The purpose of my research while at the BSR was to gather primary-source data on the two Anglican churches in Rome designed by the noted Victorian architect, George Edmund Street (1824–81). The churches are Saint Paul's Within-the-Walls (1873–6), via Nazionale, and All Saints’ (1880–7), via del Babuino. Both these buildings are fine specimens of High Victorian church architecture by one of the most accomplished English architects of the nineteenth century. Saint Paul's, especially, is considered not only among Street's greatest works, but also (by the noted American architectural historian H.-R. Hitchcock) among the best Victorian churches anywhere in the world. They are interesting for what they tell us about religious politics in post-1870 Rome, when non-Catholic churches were keen to locate themselves inside the old city walls, as well as how intelligent Victorian architects went about ‘adapting’ their designs to suit particular social and environmental contexts. In this respect there is a distinct correspondence between the churches Street designed in Britain, Continental Europe and the wider British world.

My research involved consulting extant contemporary correspondence, vestry minute books (especially building committee minutes), and historic photographs and drawings (plans). The buildings themselves were also very useful and informative sources of information. Both churches contain vestry archives in which I worked throughout the duration of my Fellowship. Among the more interesting preliminary findings is that Saint Paul's was employed as a kind of ‘Trojan Horse’ to mark out and promulgate American liberal values in the new Rome, with funds raised and the site chosen specifically for this purpose. Although there is not the same direct evidence for it, one suspects that All Saints’ was invested with a similar purpose (apart from its basic religious function). A close study of both buildings confirms that they are based almost entirely on northern Italian medieval models, which was Street's favoured form of Italian architecture. This is significant with respect to All Saints’, as it is often suggested that it is a very ‘English-looking’ church. To be sure, both buildings have different ‘accents’ — in the one case Roman, in the other English — but they are predominantly Lombardic in style, formation and materiality. This is intriguing in itself, for Street believed that northern Italian ‘Gothic’ was a particularly dignified and ‘truthful’ type of architecture, leading to the provocative possibility that he employed it intentionally as a visual marker pointing the way to a new age of propriety in Rome and, indeed, Italy. As John Ruskin would have said, perhaps Street intended his two churches to be ‘sermons in stone’.