There his thoughts first turned to architecture, and in 1841 his mother obtained a place for him as a pupil in the office of Owen Browne Carter at Winchester.

In November 1850, having been appointed architect to the diocese of Oxford by Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, he left London, and moved to Wantage, where he had already designed a vicarage, and was working on some schools.

His son Arthur Edmund Street suggested that: Possibly my father's very decided adherence to the earlier phase of Gothic, and the eagerness with which he argued that Oxford already had enough of debased types, and should revert to the purity of the early forms, may have frightened the authorities.

[5] Early in his career, he advocated the idea that architects should have a practical involvement with the decoration of their buildings, and painted murals at Boyne Hill church himself.

[6] He remained in Oxford until late in 1855, when he moved back to London, taking a house in Montagu Place, Bloomsbury.

[14] Charles Locke Eastlake, writing in 1872, saw this as a prime example of the "revolt from [English] national style" that was occurring amongst Gothic Revival architects at this time,[15] at least in part inspired by John Ruskin's enthusiasm for the medieval architecture of Northern Italy, and by the publication of Viollet-le-Duc's exhaustive Dictionnaire raisonné de l'Architecture Française du XIe au XVIe Siècle:[16] Here the whole character of the building, whether we regard its plan, its distinctive features, its external or internal decoration is eminently un-English.

The detached tower with its picturesquely modelled spire, its belfry stage rich in ornamental brick-work and marble bosses, the semicircular apse and quasi-transepts, the plate tracery, the dormers inserted in the clerestory, the quaint treatment of the nave arcade, the bold vigour of the carving, the chromatic decoration of the roof—all bear evidence of a thirst for change which Mr. Street could satisfy without danger, but which betrayed many of his contemporaries into intemperance.

[17] Street was commissioned by Alexander Lindsay, 25th Earl of Crawford in 1867 to design several aspects of the extension work undertaken at Dunecht House, Aberdeenshire.

[18] In 1868 Street was made Diocesan Architect of Ripon, in addition to the similar posts which he already held in the dioceses of York and Oxford, and to which Winchester was subsequently added.

The judges wanted Street to make the exterior arrangements and Charles Barry the interior, while a special committee of lawyers recommended the designs of Alfred Waterhouse.

Chief amongst his complete works include St Margaret's convent, East Grinstead, and the theological college at Cuddesdon.

His work was not exclusively in the Gothic revival manner, as is demonstrated by Ralli's dramatic Lycian-Byzantine temple at Norwood Cemetery, the Romanesque reworking of the nearby church of St Luke and the rebuilding of All Saints' at Roydon, in West Norfolk, in a style to match its two Norman doorways.

He was a member of the Royal Academy of Vienna, and in 1878, in reward for drawings sent to the Paris Exhibition, he was made a knight of the Legion of Honour.

They met when Street was employed to restore the Church of St James the Less in Hadleigh, Essex, where the rector was Mariquita's uncle.

Agnes and Street's sister, Mary Ann, later founded the Ladies' Ecclesiastical Embroidery Society in support of the Gothic Revival.

[22] Street's death, on 18 December 1881 aged 57, was hastened by overwork and professional worries connected with the building of the law courts.