ABSTRACT
The paper by the same author titled ‘Tall Building Boom-Now Bust?’ established that Britain experienced demand for tall buildings of an unprecedented high level from late 2006 to the financial freeze of late 2008. During this period in London alone, ten tall buildings have started, or were due to start on site. This is directly comparable in size to America’s Manhattan Island skyscraper boom of the 1920’s. The first paper investigated the evolution of theUK tall building and determined the reasons behind its growth at previously unprecedented rates; it created a definition of the UK tall building of twenty stories and above, which compares to the international tall building stage as mid-rise; it determined the average gestation and build period for a UK tall building as eight years, made up of an average of five years pre-construction and three years build period; it deter-mined the three biggest threats to the continued growth of the UK tall building market; it analyzed the differing types of demand, defining four distinct sub sectors and calculated the size and value of UK tall building market as £9.77 billion, directly equivalent to the construction budget for the 2012 Olympics; it concluded by forecasting the UK tall building market growth potential and modeled this against the Skyscraper Index (Lawrence 1999),
resulting in an almost perfect match (this infamous index historically demonstrates that tall building construction follows the peak of a country’s economic cycle and is followedbya significant economic slump).
