He attended Thomas Leverton Donaldson's lectures at University College London, and enrolled as a student at the Royal Academy Schools.

[3] He lived, however, for much of this time at The Grange, Park-lane, in Stoke Newington (now numbered 42, Clissold Crescent), a red-brick house built to his own design in 1862.

The first initiative of the scheme was to create a chancel and sanctuary of the kind held to be suitable for modern high church ideas of religious ritual.

Brooks was brought in to do the work and, according to T. Francis Bumpus, "the boldness with which he grappled with such a monster as Nash's structure won him much praise.

[8] The Church Builder said of them They are spacious in plan, affording ample accommodation for the estimated congregations, and an almost lavish supply of room besides in unseated aisles and transepts.

The exteriors were plain and unbuttressed, in red brick with stone sparingly used for window dressings and plate tracery, and for occasional bands of relief.

An exception was the South Eastern Hotel at Deal in Kent (1894), an asymmetric Renaissance Dutch-style building, in red brick with stone dressings.