Britain's high-rise developments, tracked floor by floor
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.
Britain's newest high-rises are splitting into two distinct visual camps: warm bronze-and-brick cladding versus the all-glass curtain wall. We examine why planning committees are increasingly siding with the former, and what it means for the skylines of Leeds, Manchester and London.
Britain's newest towers are shedding floor plate and gaining slenderness, driven by stronger concrete, smarter damping and planners who dislike bulk. We examine the engineering — and the limits — of the country's narrowing skyline.
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.
Every completed high-rise in Britain owes its existence to a machine most passers-by ignore. We trace the life of a tower crane on a live UK residential scheme, from the first concrete base to the nerve-shredding final dismantle.
Birmingham's high-rise pipeline has moved decisively from renders to rebar, with residential clusters rising around the Jewellery Quarter and Aston. But with planning consents outstripping construction starts, the question is no longer whether the Second City will grow upwards — it is whether the result will have a character of its own.
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.
Manchester's pipeline of 20-storey-plus residential towers has few rivals outside London, but the picture on the ground is patchier than the renders suggest. We chart which clusters are rising, which have gone quiet, and what the city will look like by the end of the decade.