Wed Mar 15, 2017 10:27 pm
It's the same in Australia. They have an island continent, but most of the people live in highly-dense cities on the coast. In Melbourne, they have apartment buildings around 90 storeys (see the Eureka tower). Melbourne has been building tall buildings for about 140 years, as they developed them shortly after the US.
For the US, it was mainly New York and Chicago that drove high-rise development. Arguable the latter more than the former. For Chicago, it was a combination of a few key technical developments/conditions that came together in one city. Following that, building practices/ideas spread around the US.
With the US (and Australia), showing off and one-up-manship has always been a huge factor. People wanted to make a statement. Developers used to have a sense of civic pride and ambition and they wanted to show the world what Americans could do.
Given what was going on in the US, you'd think the UK would have followed, with London leading the way. In fact, it did, even though there was some reluctance, Engineers and Architects in the UK were extremely keen on applied US-style tall buidlings in the UK around 1900-1930.
Two many issues blighted London's development:
1) Poor geology. - In reality the ground is little more than soup (in comparison New York has solid granite below). It's taken some considerable time for piling technology to make tall buildings (seriously tall, like the Shard) possible.
2) London Building Act. - For a long time (this was replicated in Australia in the early days too), you had requirements for large masonry walls that couldn't be properly incorporated into steel/concrete frame buildings. They couldn't make them cost effective. The requirement for masonry walls was largely due to fire (you cannot understand the impact the Great Fire of London has had on our building development).
Even though the London Building Act only applied to London, most local authorities used it when assessing developments in other parts of the country. So what you ended up with, were typically early steel-frame buildings up to about a maximum of around 8 floors.
Hence, they didn't really take off until the post-war disaster housing tower blocks. Sadly, it's the legacy of those concrete-jungle tower blocks that have given tall buildings a bad name.
But I think we're now heading in the right direction. There are something like 400-odd tall buildings being planned for London. There are also severl £Billion developments in Manchester and Liverpool. Britain will going tall!