St James the Less, Pimlico

The church was Street's first commission in London, which he took on after his widely admired work in the diocese of Oxford and at All Saints, Boyne Hill, Maidenhead, where he delivered buildings in polychromatic red brick and stone. He had also published in 1855, to considerable acclaim, his book Brick and Marble Architecture in Italy. In 1858, he was commissioned by the three daughters of the Bishop of Gloucester (James Henry Monk) to construct a church in their father's memory in what was, at the time, an area of slums and run-down tenements in a very poor part of London. The parish was inhabited by around 31,000 people at the time. The church, which stands on land formerly owned by…

The church stands back from Vauxhall Bridge Road (from which it would not originally have been visible when built) and lies parallel to the road. It is constructed primarily from red bricks with an exterior embellished with black bricks, bands of Morpeth stone, voussoirs of coloured bricks and marble shafts. They were made by James Leaver of Maidenhead in 1866. it seems likely that he based that of St James the Less on the latter examples, which he described in a lecture delivered while he was working on the church. The overall effect was quite unlike that of the traditional English church tower, but followed John Ruskin's prescription that "where the height of the tower itself is to be…