A lily among weeds

This year is the bicentenary of the birth of the prolific Victorian architect George Edmund Street. Clive Aslet considers his life, his buildings and his remarkable achievements

- Clive Aslet

THE burden of designing the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand was too much for the architect George Edmund Street: according to his son, Arthur Edmund Street, he died from overwork. However, at least he is remembered in the cavernous great hall of that building. A committee to erect a memorial to him met the year after his death, adopting a motion by the Prince of Wales that it should take the form of a statue. Made by H. H. Armstead and occupying a bay of the hall, it is one of the greatest of Victorian monuments (Fig 3). Street appears as he was in life, bearded, dynamic, stern, with a pair of dividers in one hand and a drawing spread, rather impractically, across his knees-a drawing board would have been helpful. Beneath his figure runs a frieze, in the manner of the one Armstead had already designed for the Albert Memorial, showing artists from the past directing craftsmen from the present.

This would have appealed to the coming men of the next generation, several of whom -William Morris, Philip Webb, John Dando Sedding-had been through Street's office. Morris and Webb had founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) in 1877, which would be followed in 1884 by the Art Workers Guild. They were the seminal organisations of the Arts-and-Crafts Movement, which believed that the inspiration of the medieval past should unite architects, sculptors, artists and craftsmen in the great endeavour of building. This was not exactly how Street saw his role in the profession, however. Rather than allowing craftsmen freedom of expression, he personally designed every detail of the buildings made by his office, which included 150 churches and numerous restorations.