Trevor Dannatt eschewed flamboyance for thoughtful and sensitive architecture whose subtleties and qualities reveal themselves over time. Generally using a limited a palette of often traditional materials and range of forms, he worked them into discreet but memorable buildings.

Born in 1920, he studied at the Regent’s Street Polytechnic. In 1943 he joined the legendary British modernist couple Max Fry and Jane Drew, leaving them in 1948 to join his former tutor Peter Moro who was team leader at the London County Council Architects department in charge of developing the Royal Festival Hall. This was the first significant public building in Britain to be designed in a modernist idiom, and was the only permanent structure associated with the Festival of Britain. In 1952, a year after its completion, Dannatt left the LCC and was in private practice for the rest of his career, initially as Trevor Dannatt and Partners and from 1975 as Dannatt Johnson. Like many of his contemporaries he benefited from the opportunities which came from the Welfare State and particularly its expansion of education: he designed school and university buildings at Leicester, Hull and the combination room for Trinity Hall College, Cambridge. A notable commission in the 1980s was a new complex for the British Embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. More recently, he oversaw the transformation of the Royal Naval College at Greenwich, one of the most distinguished groups of historic buildings in the UK, into accommodation for the University of Greenwich.