Blue Sky

London has its Shard, its Walkie-Talkie, its Gherkin. Birmingham has... The Beetham Tower. Beethams were the developers and there is a Beetham Tower in Liverpool and Manchester too, which all seems rather banal. It's also known as the Radisson Blu building, because that subsidiary of the Radisson organisation runs a hotel on the bottom 19 floors of 39 (the rest are apartments). Birmingham has a dry, sardoninc wit; you might have hoped they would come up with a nick-name, but perhaps that needs some love, and they haven't really taken it to their hearts

In two separate incidents, scaffolding and cladding fell of it during construction. After completion, a glass panel spontaneously shattered and rained glass on the street below in 2007, and one fell off entirely in 2020. Mercifully, none of these seem to have caused injury

It does highlight the question of why on earth we create such buildings. There are economic reasons around city centre land value. There are technological reasons around materials and development of expertise. There are social reasons around what architects, city council leaders and developers' boardrooms consider best enhances their prestige and ambition

I recently read a persuasive article about the time bomb we have created by selling leasehold property in such buildings when these hi-tech glass windows will reach the end of their (maybe 30 year) design life long before the leases expire, in 100 or 150 years. The cost of fitting replacement windows is unthinkable (even if you don't drop any), and leaseholders may find themselves with a valueless asset. Caveat emptor

It's undeniably eye-catching though, even when striding past at speed to reach the finish line of the half-marathon and cheer home our Local Hero (aka our son-in-law). Nevertheless, we gave the Radisson a miss, and restored his calories in a two-storey brick-built pub, with the grounded name of 'The British Oak'; developer unknown