Its most prominent external feature is its free-standing Italian-style tower, while its interior incorporates design themes which Street observed in medieval Gothic buildings in continental Europe.

The church was Street's first commission in London, which he took on after his widely admired work in the diocese of Oxford and at All Saints, Boyne Hill, Maidenhead, where he delivered buildings in polychromatic red brick and stone.

In 1858, he was commissioned by the three daughters of the Bishop of Gloucester (James Henry Monk) to construct a church in their father's memory in what was, at the time, an area of slums and run-down tenements in a very poor part of London.

The estate replaced a 12-acre (4.9 ha) area of dilapidated stucco-fronted houses with a dense low-rise series of residential buildings, constructed with dark red brick cladding interspersed with concrete bands.

The designers, Darbourne & Darke, set out specifically to complement the church and to avoid the use of precast concrete cladding, contemporary at the time, because they felt that it did not weather well in the British climate.

"[14] Street later wrote that this "breadth of effect" was "the very point which northern architects were most careless to succeed" and which, by implication, he sought to deliver in his churches.

The columns and capitals reflect those of the chapter house and cloister of St-Georges de Boscherville near Rouen, while the vaulting is a reinterpretation of that in the church of St Jacques, Compiègne.

[4] Although St James the Less is now highly regarded – Pevsner described it as "one of the finest Gothic Revival churches anywhere"[4] – views of its merits were not uniformly positive at the time of its construction.

[6]The reviewer in The Ecclesiologist in 1861 was much more positive, however, commenting that Street had "stepped beyond the mere repetition of English mediaeval forms, to produce a building in which a free eclectic manipulation of parts has been grafted upon a system of polychromatic construction, having its basis on the fact that London is a brick town.

[4] Charles Eastlake, in his A History of the Gothic Revival (1872), declared that "the whole character of the building, whether we regard its plan, its distinctive external or internal decorations is eminently un-English".

[13] He was particularly fulsome in praise of its campanile-like tower, declaring that "if Mr. Street had never designed anything but the campanile of this church–and its Italian character justifies the name–it would be sufficient to proclaim him an artist.

"[15] The church was no mere imitation of continental European forms either; as Street's son Arthur put it, what is Italian has become so entirely absorbed in what belongs to the architect's own inspiration, that it is hard to put the finger on any actual features which recall Italian examples, the influence being traceable rather in the choice and management of materials, and the general massing of the block of buildings, than in any more specific points.