There’s a story about the great Victorian architect Sir George Gilbert Scott (1811-1878) hopping off a train in a provincial town, marching down the street to a partly-built Gothic church and entering the site and giving orders, until the clerk of works approached and said, “Excuse me, Mr Scott.  This is Mr Street’s church.  Yours is further down the road.”

Both these architects were busy men.

Mr Street was George Edmund Street (1824-1881), who was one of Scott’s pupils for five years and established his own practice in 1849.  He was predominantly a church architect, but is best known for his Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand in London (1873-82).

One of Street’s finest designs – All Saints’ Church, Denstone (1860-62) – is in Staffordshire, a county rich in fine Gothic churches by the best Victorian architects.

All Saints’ was financed by the patron of the living, Sir Thomas Percival Heywood, Bt (1823-1897), who had retired from his father’s Manchester bank and abandoned his Unitarian faith to join the Church of England.  Sir Percival wished to establish a new parish with a church reflecting Anglo-Catholic architecture and worship in an area still dominated by Evangelical practice.

He retired to his family’s country home, Dove Leys, which he enlarged, endowed the nearby village of Denstone with the parish church (1860-62), the vicarage and the school (1866), all of them, together with the lychgate and churchyard cross, designed by George Edmund Street.  

At All Saints’ Street was responsible not only for the exterior, a composition of nave, taller apsidal chancel and circular north tower with its conical cap, but also for its opulent interior.  The entire church, inside and out, is characterised by structural polychromy, the cream Hollington stone highlighted by bands of pink stone. 

All the original interior fittings were designed by Street:  the font, reredos, organ case and pulpit were all carved by Thomas Earp (1828-1893), and the floor-tiles were manufactured by Mintons of Stoke-on-Trent.  The stained glass was manufactured by the newly-established Clayton & Bell company.  Derbyshire marble and alabaster are freely applied to give richness to the interior.

The windows are of varying designs, intended to bring daylight where it was most needed:  the south aisle has two traceried windows, in contrast to the narrow lancets in the north aisle.  There is a single rose window above the font in the north-west corner of the nave.  So that the chancel could be lit by tall windows, the walls are significantly higher than the nave.

Street regarded All Soul’s, Denstone as his favourite church and it is undoubtedly one of his finest compositions.  Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, in The Buildings of England:  Staffordshire (1974), remarked, “…here indeed is young Street at his very best”.

Denstone is very close to Alton Towers and only a few miles from A W N Pugin’s masterpiece, St Giles’ Catholic Church, Cheadle (1841-46).  Less than twenty miles away is Holy Angels, Hoar Cross (1872-1901), one of the best churches of another master of English Gothic Revival, George Frederick Bodley (1827-1907), who was another of Scott’s early pupils.

These leaders of their profession were more than nodding acquaintances.  Bodley attended two London churches – All Saints’, Margaret Street, where Street was churchwarden, and St Alban’s, Holborn, where Scott also worshipped.