A FEW years ago, I went to browse around a church designed by the Victorian architect George Edmund Street. Visitors were few, so it should come as no surprise that the vicar, finding the door open as he walked past, locked it.

I was trapped inside for three hours. Once I had finished looking around there was nothing to do but bang the door and whimper like a puppy. At half past three the flower lady inadvertently released me.

The church was in London’s Pimlico but it was here in Oxford that George Edmund Street first made his name. He was appointed diocesan architect in 1850, a post he held until his death in 1881.

Street lived and worked in a house in Beaumont Street which he shared with his wife and his son, who was born there. Among his apprentices was arts and crafts pioneer William Morris. Then a skinny lad of 21, Morris boarded in a ramshackle lodging house on the ground where the Randolph Hotel was soon to spring up.

Street’s tasks included restoration work on churches including St Michael at the Northgate, St Thomas’s, St Ebbe’s and St James in Cowley. He designed St Ebbe’s and Chinnor schools, and great Oxfordshire churches at Filkins, Little Tew, Milton-under-Wychwood, Watchfield and Wheatley.

The impressive church of St Philip and St James along Woodstock Road was designed by Street. His contemporaries compared him to “Caesar” and said “no architect of our time has got so near to the English architecture of the 13th century”.

He was a serious man who, although he tried to relax by riding horses, playing lawn tennis and rowing up the Thames, just couldn’t stop himself from taking a break to sketch the medieval churches of his mind.

What finally undid Street was the commission he won to design the Royal Courts of Justice on The Strand. He beat off 10 other architects, but he couldn’t beat off preposterous Liberal MP Acton Smee Ayrton. Newly-promoted to the post of First Commissioner of Works, Ayrton made Street’s life a misery.

The architect was harassed with endless austerity cutbacks. Ayrton slashed budgets, challenged designs and engaged in annoying nitpicking. All this after the government had spent £1.5m buying the site and demolishing 450 houses to make way for the Courts. Street himself was cautious with money, advising others that “the worse bank in the world is your pocket.”

Today the Royal Courts of Justice are considered to be Street’s masterpiece. His son later wrote that his father “got the job done, but it cost him his life.” He died at the age of 57, surviving two wives.

So there’s the story behind the architect of these fine Oxfordshire churches. Should you pay a visit do try your best not to get locked in.