Beetham Towers
 

There was a time, around the start of 2009, when it felt like every grand building project in London had stalled. Plans for a multitude of soaring shiny towers, conceived at the very height of the boom years, were filed away, the money to build them having, apparently, disintegrated in an instant. Workmen walked off sites. The skeletons of grand office blocks, only half-constructed and already bankrupt, stood silent; follies, a testament to a bygone era.
How quickly history rights itself. ‘As of this moment I’m not aware of any project that’s still on hold,’ says Peter Rees, the chief planning officer of the City of London. ‘People are either on site, in the process of tendering or are concluding deals.’