George Edmund Street
1824 - 1881
George Edmund Street, also known as G. E. Street, was an English architect, born at Woodford in Essex. Stylistically, Street was a leading practitioner of the Victorian Gothic revival. Though mainly an ecclesiastical architect, he is perhaps best known as the designer of the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand in London.
In November 1850, having been appointed architect to the diocese of Oxford by Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, he left London, and moved to Wantage, where he had already designed a vicarage, and was working on some schools. In May 1852 he went to live in Beaumont Street, Oxford. He designed the parish church of SS Philip and James in the city, and another at Summertown, as well as restoring many others. Street built or restored 113 churches in the diocese of Oxford. However, his only work for the university was the reordering of Jesus College Chapel. His son Arthur Edmund Street suggested that: Possibly my father's very decided adherence to the earlier phase of Gothic, and the eagerness with which he argued that Oxford had already enough of debased types, and should revert to the purity of the early forms, may have frightened the authorities.
During this period he developed his use of constructional polychromy, in churches such as All Saints, Boyne Hill. Maidenhead.
Early in his career, he advocated the idea that architects should have a practical involvement with the decoration of their buildings, and painted murals at Boyne Hill church himself. However, with his increasing amount of business, he soon realised the difficulties of such an approach.
He remained in Oxford until late in 1855, when he moved back to London, taking a house in Montagu Place, Bloomsbury. At around this time he entered the competition to design the new cathedral at Lille, winning second prize, behind a design by Henry Clutton and William Burges. He came second to Burges in another competition, to design the Crimea Memorial Church in Constantinople, but eventually received the commission. He also submitted, unsuccessfully, Gothic schemes for the new Foreign Office in Whitehall, and for a projected rebuilding of the National Gallery.
Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2023