George Edmund Street: Unpublished Notes and Reprinted PapersStreet, George Edmund
History
George Edmund Street: Unpublished Notes and Reprinted Papers
Street, George Edmund
Architecture, Gothic; Church architecture -- Europe; Europe -- Description and travel; Street, George Edmund, 1824-1881
[66] The subject of this paper, the probable identity of the architect
of S. Mary’s with that of Westminster, interested Street greatly,
and he refers to it often. The careful description of conscientious
restoration has an interest for us as well. I have therefore reprinted
the greater part of it without troubling the reader by indicating the
trifling omissions.
[67] Will of John Bokeland, p. 10.
[68] One of these windows is still left in the south wall of the
chancel.
[69] It appears from a note by Mr. Heathcote, a former Rector, in the
parish book, that the church and chancel were ceiled in the year 1777.
This is the only note in these books which refers to the building, if I
except an entry in regard to the erection of a western gallery, which
has been removed in the course of restoring the church. The old parish
books are all destroyed, and no record exists earlier than the end of
the last century.
[70] “Less usual,” but not unique. The church at East Barnet afforded
another example of the same mode of spending money in the palmy days of
ample church-rates and irresponsible church-wardens.
[71] John Bokeland, in his will, talks of the chancel door: I believe
he means the door in the Rood-screen, from the nave into the chancel.
[72] The central shaft and part of the internal tracery of this window
are destroyed, and we have been unable yet to restore them.
[73] I see no evidence of the existence of a clerestory; and the
columns are so delicate that I think it is impossible that it can ever
have been intended to erect one.
[74] I cannot express my vexation at finding that in spite of my
earnest injunctions to the workmen to be careful, this painted cross
was destroyed. It is often absolutely impossible for an architect to
stop wilful destruction of this kind. I have sometimes thought that it
might be a good plan to draw up a contract for church restorations,
inflicting a heavy fine on the contractor for any such destruction of
any old feature.
[75] See particularly papers by me on _Some Churches in Kent,
Surrey, and Sussex_, in the _Ecclesiologist_ of 1850, and _On the
Middle-Pointed Churches of Cornwall_, in the _Transactions_ of the
Exeter Architectural Society, vol. iv.
[76] There are one or two points which appear to me to make it possible
that the sculpture of foliage was not done at Stone, but wrought
elsewhere and sent there to be fixed. The northernmost spandrel in the
east wall should be examined with a view to this point.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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