The enigmatic term néo-grec, attached to the architecture and architectural thinking of mid-nineteenth-century France, seems to have been born in Germany. There, in the first years of the century, neugriechisch was used to describe the Byzantine-influenced Romanesque architecture of the Rhineland. Ludovic Vitet, soon to be named Inspecteur général des Monuments historiques, learned about this terminology in 1829, when he toured Germany and met with Sulpiz Boisserée, the antiquarian who had invented it. Vitet translated the term and took it home, along with the romantic view of history that it embodied.

The 16 years of labor that George Edmund Street devoted to the Royal Courts of Justice were filled with artistic and political controversy. Amidst that turmoil Street created a design whose pragmatism and visual logic marked the end of the intensely intellectual, High Victorian phase of the Gothic Revival. "Without it," Robert Kerr concluded in 1884, "the whole process of the Revival had been quite incomplete."