Born in Manchester, England, to Dorothy Groves, a woman from a Russian Jewish background, Street was told his father, an Irish pilot, had died in action during the war.

[1] Street was educated at the Christian Brothers Grammar School in Plymouth and read English and, for his doctorate, Anthropology at Oxford University; his PhD was supervised by Godfrey Lienhardt.

[3] From 1974, he taught social and cultural anthropology at the University of Sussex, assuming a post as Professor of Language and Education at King's College London and for more than fifteen years he supervised doctoral students and taught graduate workshops on ethnography, student writing in higher education and language and literacy at King's.

[4] He spent six months at the University of Pennsylvania in 1988, leading to a permanent appointment as a visiting professor in the Graduate School of Education.

Street developed his theory in opposition to leading literacy scholars at the time, including Jack Goody and Walter J. Ong.

The term literacy events was coined by Shirley Brice Heath to refer to situations in which people engage with reading or writing.

In several articles on academic literacy (most co-authored with Mary R. Lea), Street critiques the notion of academic literacy as a set of skills to give writings structure, content and clarity, and argues that this varies across disciplines, and that what is seen as "appropriate writing" is more closely tied to epistemologies and the underlying assumptions of different disciplines.

Street (and his co-authors Dave Baker and Alison Tomlin) saw numeracy, like literacy, as a social practice that cannot be reduced to a set of technical skills.