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 Westminster Abbey, was consecrated in 1861. Street also built a parish school next to the church in 1861–64, in similar style, while his son Arthur Edmund Street revisited his father's designs in 1890 to add an infants' school (now a parish hall) attached to the west end of the church. St James the Less is now embedded in the centre of the Lillington Gardens estate, which was built around the church in three phases between 1964 and 1972. The estate replaced a area of dilapidated stucco-fronted houses with a dense low-rise series of residential buildings, constructed with dark red brick cladding interspersed with concrete bands. The designers, Darbourne & Darke, set out specifically to complement the church and to avoid the use of precast concrete cladding, contemporary at the time, because they felt that it did not weather well in the British climate. The results were praised by the architectural critic Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, who wrote that the designers had chosen to ensure that "the architectural style of 1960 [is] proclaiming its appreciation of the style of 1860", which he considered "very gratifying to us committed Victorians." He declared the design of the estate to be "admirable in itself and admirable for its understanding of High Victorian values." ==Architecture==

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 made apparent, it must be ... detached as a campanile" and "there must be one bounding line from base to coping." Street later wrote that this "breadth of effect" was "the very point which northern architects were most careless to succeed" and which, by implication, he sought to deliver in his churches. His tower at St James the Less was his most pronounced example of a free-styling campanile, though he built similar examples of solid, massive, freestanding towers at a number of other churches in England and Rome. The fittings of St James the Less are mostly original and were part of Street's vision for the church. A heavily carved pulpit was carved by Thomas Earp, though it is now somewhat battered. In 1861 George Frederic Watts provided a fresco of the Last Judgement known as "The Doom" above the chancel arch. He replaced it in the 1880s with a mosaic of Venetian glass made to the same design, after the original fresco had deteriorated. The church's stained glass was designed by Clayton and Bell and depicts various saints, including its patron St James the Less. The font is capped by an unusual domed iron canopy that was displayed at the 1862 International Exhibition. ==Critical views==

Although St James the Less is now highly regarded – Pevsner described it as "one of the finest Gothic Revival churches anywhere" The church was no mere imitation of continental European forms either; as Street's son Arthur put it, what is Italian has become so entirely absorbed in what belongs to the architect's own inspiration, that it is hard to put the finger on any actual features which recall Italian examples, the influence being traceable rather in the choice and management of materials, and the general massing of the block of buildings, than in any more specific points. ==References==