One of our most famous buildings – mainly because of frequent appearances on news programmes, with well-known litigants giving interviews outside it – is the Royal Courts of Justice. This great Gothic phantasmagoria, on the Strand in London, has become synonymous with our legal system. The competition to build it was won in 1868 by George Edmund Street, then 44 years old: this year is the bicentenary of his birth. He is regarded as one of the great names of the Gothic Revival. Work did not begin on the Law Courts until 1873, partly because a network of slums first had to be cleared from the site. By the time Queen Victoria opened them in 1882, Street was dead, reputedly from overwork, at the age of 57.
Street became the incarnation of the High Victorian phase of the Gothic Revival. He was not merely a formidable architect, but also a gifted writer about architecture. His love of the Gothic was partly inspired by his devotion to the writings of John Ruskin, who although only five years his senior exerted great influence over him. Ruskin regarded the Gothic style as the only possible one to project godliness; Street, by upbringing a High Church Anglican, agreed, and this shaped his architectural ideas. He built more than 100 churches in mid-Victorian England, and designed religious buildings in Ireland, Paris and even Constantinople: he was, with George Gilbert Scott, the pre-eminent church builder of his era. The Law Courts were no afterthought, but nor were they typical.
Initially, Street studied with Owen Carter, an unremarkable Hampshire architect with an early interest in the Gothic Revival; although not a great artist, his influence on Street was profound. Street then went to work with Scott, who in the early 1840s was making a name for himself building impressive workhouses, required after the Poor Law of 1834. While working for Scott, Street learnt from his two other assistants: George Frederick Bodley, who became his only serious rival as a Gothic Revival church builder, and William White, one of the foremost church restorers of the period.
After building a couple of Puginesque churches in Cornwall, Street set up a practice in Berkshire. He quickly became architect to the diocese of Oxford, where he would build extensively over the next 30 years. Showing the enduring influence of Ruskin, he wrote a series of important articles about the development of the Gothic style in The Ecclesiologist in the early 1850s, making a name for himself as a theoretician as well as a practitioner. He travelled widely in Europe, as Ruskin had, and wrote two highly-respected books as a consequence, on Italian Gothic and, later, on Spanish Gothic. Thanks to his travels, he became an expert on polychromatic work, pioneered in England by William Butterfield, at All Saints, Margaret Street, in central London.
Street put his learning to use in two highly significant churches: All Saints, Boyne Hill, in Maidenhead, Berkshire, and the 1858 ecclesiological masterpiece St James the Less, Pimlico – his first commission in London. It has a campanile – something much advocated by Ruskin – that is attributed to the Genoese style. The church contains a stunning mosaic of the Last Judgment by George Frederic Watts. This gem is largely hidden in a side street behind Victoria station.
His first major work was Cuddesdon Theological College (1854): a piece of patronage from the Oxford diocese. It became a template for his later work. As Street became more successful, he married and moved to London, his practice fuelled not merely by building churches, but also many of their vicarages and rectories. He also built a number of school buildings, notably Bloxham in Oxfordshire and Dover College in Kent. But in the 1860s, his church work became more and more substantial: it included the virtual rebuilding of Christ Church, Dublin, and the construction of the nave of Bristol Cathedral.
His Law Courts, once they came, were the last great hurrah of the Gothic Revival. The building will remain Street’s finest monument, and a reminder of an age when the spiritual played a profound role not just in our public art, but in our politics, too.
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