38 BCD SPECIAL REPORT ON HISTORIC CHURCHES 31st ANNUAL EDITION The nave of St Peter’s: the east window (1865–6) and the wall paintings in the nave (1873) are all by Clayton & Bell, including the crucifixion scene around the chancel arch the Nikolaikirche in Hamburg following a fire, and Street worked on the details. Scott’s scheme emerged as the winner. Street’s first independent commissions were in Cornwall while still working for Scott in 1847. Like Scott, Street had by now joined the Ecclesiological Society, as the Camden Society was now known, and he was an active participant, contributing to talks and its journal. He was also exhibiting his drawings in London and generally promoting the study and development of gothic form, and making a name for himself in the process. He made friends with Benjamin Webb, secretary and one of the founders of the Camden Society, and in 1850 Webb helped Street secure the post of architect to the Diocese of Oxford, primarily to examine and advise on all new proposals for church buildings and renovations. It was a prestigious post which brought him further commissions for churches, parsonages and schools, and gave him time to take the first of many annual study tours on the continent, making drawings of gothic architecture, particularly in northern France, Germany and Italy. In 1855 Street published his first book on gothic architecture, Brick and Marble in the Middle Ages: Notes of a Tour in Italy. It was hugely influential and arguably cemented his career, and his most prestigious commissions followed. Geoff Brandwood writing in his biography of Street compares this volume with John Ruskin’s Stones of Venice which had been published between 1851 and 1853: ‘If Brick and Marble lacks the beauty of Ruskin’s prose and sensitivity of observation, it more than makes up for it by the study of many more examples, and Street approaches his subject as an architect rather than an airy art critic. Street understood buildings and the way they were planned and constructed in a way that Ruskin did not, nor, even, was interested in.’ Street’s first major urban commission was St Peter’s in Bournemouth. The construction of a relatively modest church had begun in 1841, but the town was expanding rapidly and the plans failed to match the ambitions of its new Tractarian vicar, the Reverand Alexander Morden Bennett, who took up the ministry in 1845. Street was engaged shortly after the south aisle was added in 1851, and over the next 20 years he and Bennett transformed the building into a Gothic Revival masterpiece with the help of some of the finest craftspeople in the country, hand-picked by Street. These included the sculptors Thomas Earp and James Details from two of the stained glass windows designed by Street and made by Clayton & Bell for St Peter’s, Bournemouth: on the left, the crucifixion is shown in the upper part of the centre light flanked by related scenes from the New Testament and with related scenes from the Old Testament below; on the right a youthful St John is depicted in one of the Apostles’ windows.
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