Not since the 1960s, when so much went wrong, have we seen such a concerted emphasis on building high. Britain's planning laws and innate conservatism have since stifled most tall office towers - hardly surprisingly, given the abysmal standard of most of those that were built in the post-war years. Meanwhile the memory of some high-profile council tower-block disasters - especially the partial collapse of Ronan Point in East London in 1970 - meant that we were suspicious of building homes high in the sky for three decades.

But what a change is now taking place. At the same time that a new generation of office towers by big-name architects - Foster, Rogers, Grimshaw, Piano - is emerging, we are taking to high-rise living: this time not as take-it-or-leave-it council tenants, but as private buyers with the choice. Eye-rubbingly tall private apartment towers in Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham, for instance, are being built or planned by the alarmingly young developer Stephen Beetham. So you think nobody will buy? Think again. When Beetham's 47-storey, 561-foot, £150 million Manchester skyscraper on Deansgate was first proposed (5-star Hilton hotel in the bottom half, 219 apartments in the top half), all but a handful of the flats were sold before the tower even had planning permission. It is designed by architect Ian Simpson, whose work had been getting steadily higher and higher anyway as Manchester rebuilt its centre after the 1996 IRA bomb blast that devastated the city centre. Today, with work on the foundations only just beginning, contracts for one-bed flats there are being sold on for £250,000. Heaven knows what they will fetch by the time the tower is actually completed in 2007.