Background
Tanner was born in Street Pancras, London 1849 to Robert Tanner, a master carpenter and Elizabeth Selby.
Tanner was born in Street Pancras, London 1849 to Robert Tanner, a master carpenter and Elizabeth Selby.
He attended the Royal Academy before gaining work experience on building sites in Wiltshire and Surrey.
In 1873, he was promoted from Clerk to First Assistant. In 1877, he had moved to the London District Office of Works, but this did not last long and in 1882 he moved to Leeds where he took up the position of Surveyor, second class. This was a short move, and Tanner returned to London two years later to take up the position of Surveyor, First Class, with responsibility for the Post & Telegraph services.
In 1891 he became a fellow of Royal Institute of British Architects, and listed numerous buildings he had designed including York Post Office (1885) and Birmingham Post Office (1889-1891).
He was also awarded the Royal Institute of British Architects Tate prize for Classical Architecture in 1878. His designs were normally French Renaissance in style.
In 1898, he took over as the Principal Surveyor of the London Office of Works. In 1899 he started one of his biggest projects, Post Office Savings Bank in West Kensington.
Other projects completed under his guidance were Land Registry in Lincoln"s Inn Fields & West Extension to the Law Courts in The Strand, London.
In 1904, Tanner was knighted by King Edward VII, and also chaired a Royal Institute of British Architects committee on the use of reinforced concrete, a substance that he used extensively in his last big project the King Edward Post Office Building (1907-1910). He served in 1910-1912 as President of the Concrete Institute (later to become the Institution of Structural Engineers}.