Designer Biography

George Edmund Street

Born: 1824

Died: 1881

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After serving his articles with the architect Owen Carter in Winchester and working in the London office of George Gilbert Scott, Street began his independent career in Oxford. He moved his successful and busy practice to London in 1856. Although primarily a church architect and restorer, he won the important secular commission to build the new Law Courts in London, which occupied him from 1868 until his death. Furniture for the Law Courts was made by Gillow's and other Street furniture by Holland & Sons - Street was related to the Hollands by his second marriage. In the second series of Instrumenta Ecclesiastica (1856), some of his metalwork designs were published, and in 1857 he took over from William Butterfield the supervision of the manufacture of church plate by Keith & Co. for the Ecclesiological Society. Street in turn was replaced by William Burges in 1864. His metalwork was also made by Hardman, Skidmore, and Barkentin & Krall. Street's ecclesiastical embroidery designs were executed by Jones & Willis, who exhibited them in the London Exhibitions of 1851 and 1862, and by the Ecclesiological Embroidery Society, founded by his sister in 1854. Stained glass designs were made by Hardman and Clayton & Bell, and the encaustic floor tiles designed by Street for the restoration of Dublin Cathedral were exhibited by Craven Dunnill & Co. at the Paris Exhibition of 1878. He was a deeply committed Gothic revivalist, believing in the inevitable rightness of Ruskin's views on the subject. His travels resulted in two influential studies of Continental Gothic architecture, Brick and Marble Architecture in North Italy (1855), and Some Account of Gothic Architecture in Spain (1865). Assistants and pupils in his busy studio included Philip Webb, William Morris, Norman Shaw and J. D. Sedding.