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8 articles
Architects hand over drawings; concierges inherit the consequences. We speak to the staff who run Britain's residential towers and find that the most honest audit of any tall building is written not in reports, but in the daily logbook at the front desk.
While the city sleeps, the tallest sites in Britain run their loudest hours. We spend a night with the electricians, steel erectors and concrete crews whose work is timed to traffic curfews rather than daylight.
Britain celebrates its tallest towers and forgets its deepest holes. It is time the subterranean engineering beneath our high-rises got the recognition it deserves — because digging down is far harder than building up.
From shadow studies in Chelsea to heritage objections in Edinburgh, Britain's most contested tall building applications reveal a planning system at war with itself. Our columnist asks whether the appeals process has become the true bottleneck in the race skyward.
Across the country, towers sit half-built — cores open to the weather, cranes long gone, neighbours left staring at concrete frames. This is what happens when a skyline stalls, and why some of these stranded schemes may yet rise again.
Britain's skylines are haunted as much by what was never built as by what stands. From recession-shelved 1990s schemes to today's stalled applications, the graveyard of unbuilt towers tells us more about our cities than any completion photo.
From a rising student tower in Glasgow to a refined residential stack in Leeds, ten schemes across Britain are climbing right now. Here is our watchlist — with floors counted, dates flagged and the planning dramas that got each one to site.
London keeps approving towers it then quietly fails to build. From stalled Square Mile schemes to height cuts in Vauxhall, the capital's tallest ambitions are being eroded by viability gaps, empty offices and the strange new economics of retrofit. Something has to give — and it is usually the top floor.