Royal Courts of Justice

The creation of the Law Courts was a 16 year odyssey from Competition to Royal Opening in 1882. The commission eventually came to George Edmund Street, a Londoner who had worked in the office of Giles Gilbert Scott. He was 43 at the time and had been in practice on his own account already for 15 years when he managed to shake off Barry and Waterhouse to get the big job for himself. A high Anglican, and churchwarden of Butterfield's All Saints, Margaret St, designing and restoring churches was his main work. He built churches in Istanbul, Rome and Switzerland as well as over a hundred in Britain.

The Law Courts are one of the three big Gothic Revival masterpieces of Victorian London, along with the Houses of Parliament and St Pancras. Unlike Pugin's Parliament, which is very English in its insistent Perpendicular, these buildings feel more French in their inspiration. Street often used primitive Gothic in his churches, where the windows appear to have been cut out of the wall rather than formed with mullions, but if he did mullions they were usually French High Gothic, a taste more like the early authenticity imagined by Viollet le Duc. When he used brickwork, he liked to use dazzling stripes of stone and brick, my favourite being St Mary Magdalene in Paddington.