The Royal Courts of Justice

George Edmund Street (1824-1881), Designer

1868-82

The Strand, London

Compare this photograph of Street's soot-covered Law Courts in Summer taken in 1967, c. 1902, and in 1999 after their partial restoration and cleaning. For a few years at least, Street's contemporaries had experienced his bright stone structure, but within a few years London's heavy pollution darkened the original light colors. What effect do you expect that the polluted surfaces of such Neo-gothic structures had upon the way they were considered in the early years of modernism?

Photograph and text by George P. Landow (2004)

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