00:00Birmingham is going vertical. The Octagon, now finished at Paradise, stands 49 storeys high, the UK's tallest pure residential tower outside London.
00:12Not far away, one east side will soon match it, a 51 storey built-to-end scheme beside the future HS2 Curzon Street Station.
00:22Together they mark a turning point the moment Birmingham stopped expanding outwards and started looking up.
00:28The council backs clusters of tall buildings around key transport hubs, climbing density makes better use of land.
00:35Investors see a booming rental market, thousands of young professionals wanting to live, work and spend near the centre.
00:43But most of these flats aren't cheap and few counters affordable. Octagon offers none on site, east side will have roughly 3%.
00:52Critics say the skyline is rising faster than local wages and that affordable housing contributions paid in cash rarely reappear as real homes anywhere nearby.
01:05The city's design guide promises balance, height where it fits, human scale where it doesn't.
01:11Yet with land value soaring and council coffers thin, pressure builds to bend those rules.
01:17There's pride in seeing Birmingham compared with global cities but glass towers alone don't solve housing shortages or social divides.
01:25Behind the facades are deeper questions, who benefits from this boom and who's being priced out of their own city.
01:31Birmingham wants to look like a world city but the measure of that isn't how tall it builds.
01:36It's where the ordinary Brummies can still afford to live in the shadow of those towers.
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