I think our failure in the production of good town churches of distinctive character must have struck you often, as it has me, when contrasted with our comparative success in country churches.

Wantage and Oxford

In November 1850 having been appointed architect to the diocese of Oxford he left London and moved to Wantage where he had already designed a vicarage and was working on some schools. These works inspired the wider use of constructional polychromy by British architects sometimes mocked as "The Streaky Bacon Style". The judges wanted Street to make the exterior arrangements and Charles Barry the interior while a special committee of lawyers recommended the designs of Alfred Waterhouse.

George Edmund Street (20 June 1824 – 18 December 1881) was an English architect born at Woodford in Essex. Stylistically Street was a leading practitioner of the Victorian Gothic revival.