I was a bit early for lunch, so called in on St. James-the-Less which I haven’t seen since 1972, during the period when it was still threatened with demolition. It’s remarkably impressive – an intact example of Street’s polychromatic brickwork, designed in 1858, not long after he had published The Brick and Marble Architecture of Northern Italy in 1855 and his first work in London, described by Nairn as ‘taut, curled in, fighting mad – a superb performance’:-
wonderful inhabited capitals! dubbed “A lily among weeds” by the ILN
Street at his best. I hadn’t realised it was so early.