High in the clouds, the competition is heating up.
Liverpool used MIPIM, the UK’s premier property conference held in Cannes last week, to announce it wants to build a 70-storey skyscraper that would be the tallest building outside London.
Local leaders, including the Labour mayor Steve Rotheram see it as a symbol of the city’s changing fortunes – a place with big ambitions and the ear of Sir Keir Starmer’s government.
But just 30 miles down the road, their long-time rivals in Greater Manchester are up for the fight, with a 77-storey tower in the pipeline, which would become the UK’s third-tallest building and immediately take Liverpool’s crown. Manchester’s rapid accumulation of skyscrapers has given rise to the nickname ‘Manc-hattan’.
Leeds, Newcastle and Sheffield also have plans for their own tallest buildings in the pipeline and Cardiff announced proposals for Wales’ biggest skyscraper earlier this month.
So why are so many places, especially cities in the north of England, reaching for the skies?
With better rent yields and more development opportunities, experts say the UK’s property market is undergoing a shift away from an overheated London bubble.
Building a luxury skyscraper represents a statement of success, experts say, but also means cities can offer the kind of “New-York-style lifestyle” of glitzy, high-rise living aspired to by many in the social media age.
There are concerns, however, that high-rise towers fail to tackle the country’s chronic shortage of affordable housing and are often used by foreign investors to earn vast profits.
The ‘shift north’ in city-centre living
James White, professor of Planning and Urban Design at the University of Glasgow, said London’s market for high-rise buildings has “entirely fallen out and there’s now no appetite to build any more.”
He added: “Yet at the same time, there’s been this sort of shift north.
“They’ve also got this new political context where they’ve all got mayors and combined authorities and these mayors are looking to put the city on the map.
Manchester city centre has seen a boom in development over the last decade (Photo: Mary Turner/Bloomberg/Getty)“They [mayors] become a big figurehead for the city, I think Andy Burnham [in Manchester] has proved that can be effective.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if the city leaders in Liverpool, Leeds and Birmingham look to Manchester with some envy and think ‘Manchester is demonstrating what can be done’.”
Hugh Frost, chairman of development company Beetham Davos, which is behind Liverpool’s new skyscraper, is now aged 75 and has been frustrated by the pace of change in his home city in recent decades.
“It’s about time Liverpool had something like this,” he told The i Paper.
“I think that ambitious buildings have their own message for where a city is up to, and where it’s going.”
The last time Liverpool built a new tallest building was in 2008, with the 40-storey Beetham Tower West.
Since then, the global financial crash and allegations of corruption within Liverpool’s local government have seen investors look elsewhere, most notably in Manchester.
There, the city centre now expands outwards into parts of Salford and Trafford and has no less than 15 buildings that are at least 40 storeys or higher.
Liverpool’s skyscraper would be the tallest building outside London if completed first (Photo: Beetham Davos)By comparison, Liverpool has been damaged by a number of stalled developments that have seen investors lose their money.
The new skyscraper proposal is being backed by Tom Morris, the local billionaire behind the Home Bargains stores.
“I’m not stupid enough to turn a blind eye to the fact we’ve had some reputational damage,” said Rotheram.
“It shows you how much we’ve recovered from those knockbacks that people are now wanting to put their money where their mouths are.”
‘We don’t want to be Manchester 2 – we’ll do it our own way’
Rotheram acknowledges there may be some friendly rivalry taking place with Liverpool’s ambition to overtake Manchester in a skyscraper war – “it’s ‘my dad’s bigger than your dad’ isn’t it”, he joked.
But he believes Liverpool – which received a further £95m in funding from Chancellor Rachel Reeves in a new package for building homes in northern cities this week – can now afford to do things its own way.
“Manchester’s great, I’m not knocking it at all,” he said.
“But we don’t want ‘Manchester 2’ here, we want to be our own area with our own particular way of developing out the assets that we’ve got.”
Cirrus Point in Leeds is set to be Yorkshire’s tallest building when it opens later this year (Photo: Cain)The Chancellor has also announced plans to take the devolution of political power outside of Westminster even further and allow mayors to keep a share of taxes – they have already been given the green light to implement a “tourist levy”.
Rotheram said devolution has given northern cities like Liverpool “confidence” and “an opportunity to shape your own destiny.”
In Salford, plans have recently been approved for a 77-storey skyscraper that will eclipse the current tallest building in Greater Manchester, the 64-storey South Tower in Deansgate Square.
If completed to its full height, only two buildings in the UK – The Shard and 22 Bishopsgate, both in London – will be taller.
In Cardiff, a 50-storey skyscraper that will become the tallest building in Wales has been given the go-ahead. And Leeds is about to complete Cirrus Point, reportedly the tallest purpose-built student accommodation in the world, at 45 storeys high.
Plans have recently been approved to build Wales’s tallest building in Cardiff (Photo: 5Plus Architects)High-rise living, whether for students or young professionals, is seen as a way of keeping hold of a city’s talent pool.
White believes developers selling apartments in cities like Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool have managed to successfully market “a lifestyle” as well as a place to live.
Many skyscrapers come with state-of-the-art gyms, swimming pools, cinema rooms and even roof terraces to do yoga or hang out and drink cocktails.
A building in Manchester called Moda Living even offers residents cookery classes, Uber credit, use of a co-working space and a private room for parties.
On its Instagram account, the company uses the hashtag
“LiveTheModaLife” to reflect the fact that almost every aspect of residents’ lives is entwined with their city centre apartment.
Developers such as Moda offer gyms, cinema rooms and roof terraces at their developments (Source: @livethemodalife/Instagram)“The adverts have that feel of a New York-style lifestyle, they have the bars downstairs, the images of the scantily-clad people swimming in the pool, it’s marketing this young, urban image in this new, cosmopolitan city,” Frost said.
“I think that for people who wish to live in the city centre, the only way really is up. But also, communities within buildings are something that’s starting to evolve quite successfully.”
Luxury towers are ‘skin-deep policy approach’
White says the trend towards skyscrapers may also reflect changes to building safety regulations that came into effect following the Grenfell fire disaster in 2017.
Towers are now required to have more complex cores and there are new rules around lifts and fire access that make them more expensive to build, he says.
This might mean that buildings that are 10 to 15 storeys are not financially viable, whereas when it’s a much taller tower, “the sums add up”, White adds.
Rotheram said while he endorses the new skyscraper in Liverpool, known as the Kings development, he acknowledges “concerns” around both the potential damage to existing architecture and the broader housing market.
“We’re not putting a great big skyscraper next to St George’s hall or the Albert Dock,” he said.
“What we’re saying is there’s a brownfield land policy… and there is a huge area where density would be an appropriate way of developing that out.
“If people want to live in these things, we don’t want them to leave Liverpool because they want to live in the city centre somewhere else.
“There’s nowhere with the assets that we’ve got in Liverpool city region, with the waterfront, the culture and the architecture.
“That’s why it’s become more and more attractive to investors, people are voting with their feet.”White agrees that Liverpool has “so much cultural capital to build on” and that high-rise development is a way of “internationalising the image of the city”.
But he warned there are examples of cities in other parts of the world – such as Toronto in Canada and Melbourne in Australia – where a boom in skyscrapers has been followed by a crash.
“I think it’s, however, a bit of a skin-deep policy approach; I don’t think it always works out,” he warned.
“It has a tendency to leave those who need investment and support behind. It doesn’t really do much for the people of Manchester who are struggling, nor will it do much for Liverpool in that respect.”
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