George Edmund Street by Geoff Brandwood, edited by Peter Howell and Peter CW Taylor

I am biased, I know; and having written a book on the subject, this could be considered a bit of a special plea, but I will say it frankly: the Victorians were the greatest church builders of all time. Even if you disagree about the quality, you cannot deny the quantity. By the 1850s the Anglican church-building frenzy had reached such a peak that a new church was being consecrated every four or five days. The other denominations built at a similarly breathtaking pace. The result was a forest of steeples and spires, one or two churches – and sometimes many more – on every street across the country.

This phenomenon was due to a number of factors: the enormous wealth of the country, the frenzied energy of its people, the ruthless competition between denominations and the general fear of the forces of secularisation. It was given physical form by a new generation of architects who specialised in church building and were also experts in medieval architecture. Among the giants of this new generation of professionals was George Edmund Street, who was responsible for the building of 150 new churches and the restoration (which sometimes meant rebuilding) of a further 300.

Street was not the most prolific of these architects – that was perhaps the extraordinarily prolific Ewan Christian, whose career spanned some 2,000 projects. Street was neither the most famous nor the most influential. Like almost all his contemporaries, he owed an enormous debt to the brilliant and controversial Augustus Pugin. Street’s fame was also somewhat less than that of his master, George Gilbert Scott, whose empire (the word is not too much of an exaggeration) included hundreds of churches and cathedrals from Newfoundland to New Zealand and – in the form of the University of Glasgow – almost certainly the country’s greatest building project.

with kind permission of the authorsGE Street was the architect of St. Paul’s Within the Walls (the American church) in Rome. From the book

Still, Street’s importance was undeniable. His work is instantly recognizable and his methods were entirely distinctive. Scott had an office so large that he hardly knew what it produced. Stories circulated of him arriving at a building site and giving instructions to the site manager, only to be told, “You know, Mr. Scott, that’s not your church; that’s Mr. Street’s, your church is down the street.” Admiring a church in another town, he inquired about its authorship and was surprised to learn that he himself was the architect. “The scope of my business,” Scott recalled in his memoirs, “was always too great for my capacity to attend to it.”

Street shied away from this approach and was so obsessed with monitoring everything that his assistants complained he wouldn’t even allow them to design a keyhole.

It was an impossible undertaking in many ways. It was also dangerous – and many believed Street killed himself by overworking while trying to complete the designs for the courthouses on the Strand in London. But Street’s vision was not purely professional. It sprang from his faith. Indeed, as this brief but insightful study makes clear: “For Street, life, art and architecture and his Christian faith were inseparable.” A committed High Churchman (and churchwarden of the stronghold of Anglo-Catholicism, All Saints’ in Margaret Street), he built primarily for those who shared his views: hence Cuddesdon College; St Margaret’s Convent, East Grinstead; and St Mary’s Convent, Wantage, as well as a whole host of other Tractarian projects.

Street’s papers were destroyed in the Blitz. His single-mindedness and the austerity of his architecture also meant that he did not attract the biographical attention that might otherwise have been expected. Apart from his son’s memoirs, published in 1888, and a brilliant account of the law courts written by Professor David Brownlee almost a century later, we lack a full-length treatise on Street’s life and work. This is not quite that. Rather, it is a brief introduction to the subject. It is nonetheless very welcome, well informed and beautifully illustrated.

The Venerable Dr William Whyte is Fellow and Tutor of St John’s College, Oxford, and Professor of Social and Architectural History at the University of Oxford.

George-Edmund-Strasse
Geoff Brandwood, Author
Peter Howell and Peter CW Taylor, editors
Liverpool University Press £40
(978-1-80207-812-1)
Church Times Bookshop £36