A young architect and a reforming vicar
George Edmund Street was born at Woodford in Essex in 1824 and trained in the office of George Gilbert Scott. He was a devout high churchman, and in 1849 the ecclesiologist Benjamin Webb recommended him to William John Butler, the new vicar of Wantage, who wanted a vicarage. It was one of Street’s first independent commissions, and Butler went on to give him much more work.
In 1850 Bishop Samuel Wilberforce appointed Street architect to the diocese of Oxford, and in November that year he moved to Wantage to be near his main client. He lived in the town until May 1852, when he moved to Oxford. It was there, a few years later, that the young William Morris and Philip Webb worked in his office.
His buildings in Wantage
Street’s work shaped Victorian Wantage. As well as the vicarage, he designed the stone buildings for the refounded King Alfred’s Grammar School in 1850, in a thirteenth-century Gothic style, and drew up plans to restore the parish church, which met fierce opposition from the vestry in 1852 and went ahead only later. For the new sisterhood that Butler had founded he designed St Mary’s Home, now St Mary’s Convent, built in 1855–56, and its first chapel of 1858–61. The later, larger convent chapel is by J. L. Pearson.
Across the diocese Street built or restored more than a hundred churches. Close to Wantage, he designed the new St Mary’s Church at Fawley in 1865–66, the church that stands in the village Thomas Hardy later called Marygreen.
Later career
Street became one of the leading architects of the Gothic Revival, and from 1868 he was the architect of the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand, his largest work, unfinished when he died in 1881. He was buried in the nave of Westminster Abbey.
What to see locally
- St Mary’s Convent, Denchworth Road, Wantage (a private religious house; the listed buildings can be seen from the road).
- The former grammar school buildings, Portway, now part of King Alfred’s Academy.
- St Mary’s Church, Fawley, on the downs south of Wantage.