Talk:List of tallest buildings and structures in the Birmingham Metropolitan Area, West Midlands: Difference between revisions

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:* This page covers the buildings and structures in ”’all ten metropolitan boroughs”’ of Greater Manchester.

:* This page covers the buildings and structures in ”’all ten metropolitan boroughs”’ of Greater Manchester.

:* It currently consists of ”’nine”’ separate lists with a total of ”’451 detailed entries”’.

:* It currently consists of ”’nine”’ separate lists with a total of ”’451 detailed entries”’.

:* This Birmingham Metro page, to which you have taken particular exception, covers the buildings and structures in ”’all six metropolitan boroughs”’ of the West Midlands.

:* This Birmingham Metro page, to which you have taken particular exception, covers the buildings and structures in ”’six metropolitan boroughs”’ of the West Midlands.

:* It currently contains ”’eleven”’ separate lists with a total of ”’580 entries”’, of which only around ”’400 are detailed”’.

:* It currently contains ”’eleven”’ separate lists with a total of ”’580 entries”’, of which only around ”’400 are detailed”’.

:Hence, unless you are proposing to split the Greater Manchester tall buildings page into three or more distinct urban regions to suit your WP:SIZE requirements, you have contradicted your own rationale. Hell, maybe you should go ahead and split the London page into the City of London and its 32 boroughs. I actually live in one which has some grass between it and the City of London, so maybe my community is “geographically and culturally distinct” for the purposes of the tall buildings page.

:Hence, unless you are proposing to split the Greater Manchester tall buildings page into three or more distinct urban regions to suit your WP:SIZE requirements, you have contradicted your own rationale. Hell, maybe you should go ahead and split the London page into the City of London and its 32 boroughs. I actually live in one which has some grass between it and the City of London, so maybe my community is “geographically and culturally distinct” for the purposes of the tall buildings page.

An explanatory footnote says that “the suburban tower blocks located across the region have been omitted from this section”. Is that because they are below 35 meters high? If not, that seems rather arbitrary. — Beland (talk) 21:58, 29 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Noting question has still not been answered, to prevent bot archiving. — Beland (talk) 18:19, 31 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

As of writing this article has well over 200 entries, making it one of the longest “tallest building” articles on Wikipedia. Lists like these are meant to capture the tallest buildings, not as a repository for every high-rise in a city – there are other sources for that, such as SkyscraperPage. I think the entries below 50 metres (164 ft) should be removed from the list. LivinAWestLife (talk) 01:11, 1 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Additionally, I am in favor of a split for this article, possibly as a way to mitigate its length. Having the page be dedicated to the entire metro area without one for the city specifically is unusual, and unlike Salford and Manchester, Coventry isn’t even in the same built-up area as Birmingham is. I would propose to split Coventry’s buildings from those in the Birmingham built up area, and rename the title “List of tallest buildings in Birmingham”. LivinAWestLife (talk) 01:14, 1 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

My thoughts on this, avoiding Wiki jargon.

Firstly, in light of the comments above I have made some amendments to this page, including the headings and section ordering, to help synergise it with other similar pages and improve the overall UX.

However, I think it is important to recognise that the content of each “List of tallest buildings” page is made bespoke in order to capture the relevant data for each place. What constitutes a tall building in Rome, Sacramento or Birmingham does not necessarily constitute a tall building in Dubai, New York or Hong Kong. This is reflected in the variable height parameters for each page. Similarly, the bounded morphologies of cities vary significantly between each other: as a basic example, all but the largest US cities tend to have a built-up downtown cluster and relatively few outlying BUAs; in Europe the opposite is often true. This is reflected in the geopolitical boundaries drawn around each place, which will always be distinct to each region and/or nation and must be guided by the available evidence.

Referring specifically to Birmingham, a city-region I know well, and the comparison LivinAWestLife makes with Manchester: the West Midlands metropolitan county is the equivalent of Greater Manchester in almost every respect, with one exception being that the West Midlands has a protected green space running through it and Greater Manchester, to the best of my knowledge, does not. The BUA is not the salient factor here. For example, Liverpool’s City Region incorporates The Wirral, which is a geographically separated peninsula in the county of Cheshire. Coventry forms part of the Birmingham Metro Area and this is clearly supported by the evidence. I think we should be careful not to overlay “idealised” city templates onto these pages. Ultimately, it is about providing useful and accurate information for each area, which this page delivers.

In terms of the cut-off for building heights, in the absence of any prescribed standard, I feel this point is being driven more by personal preference than by convention. For Birmingham and its Metro, taller buildings and structures are scattered across the urban landscape and many of its landmark buildings – which may be of importance – fall within the 35-50 metre range. I think it is a weak rationale to suggest that a tranche of good quality and potentially interesting content should be discarded simply because it is of no personal interest or takes a few extra moments to scroll through. Remember, the content of this page has high importance regionally (for Birmingham and the West Midlands, see above). While the height of a church in Bromsgrove in relation to one in Birmingham may be of little interest globally, it is of interest to some – believe it or not I am in receipt of an email to prove it!

Still, noting the overall length of the page, I have made some adjustments to condense the volume of information. Again though, I do not agree with the wholesale removal of any of the current sections: ‘Existing’ is existing; ‘Approved’ is approved, ‘Proposed’ is proposed, ‘Unbuilt’ is unbuilt; and ‘Demolished’ is demolished. These are standard sections for the city listings pages so I do not really understand the discussion around this. The reason I created a separate list entitled ‘Emergent’ is because I felt it was important to clearly delineate between the proposals that have been formally submitted to the relevant local authority, and schemes which are in the public domain but may only be at the pre-application or masterplanning stage. I was motivation to do this because other UK pages, notably London and Manchester, were listing these sorts of schemes without noting the distinctions and indeed, in some cases, without including any supporting evidence at all. I suggest that rather than homing in on listings which have been diligently referenced, time would be better served focusing on the pages where this remains a problem.

The argument that selected schemes should be discarded from this section because they may not come to fruition is also, in my view, a tenuous one – a construction project can stall or alter at any point in the process, right up until its completion. Ultimately, emergent schemes are not a “future event” because they already exist in the public domain and are therefore relevant and potentially important in context. Moreover, the majority of these listings are pre-apps, meaning they have already entered the “formal” planning process, albeit at a preparatory stage. When these apps do not progress, I typically transfer the details to the “Tallest unbuilt” section. Hence, this pre-planning information is still required for the page. Again, I would argue that clearly signposted listings, supported by evidence, are the key to managing this process effectively.

With this being said, I do agree that the term “Emergent” is a non-standard one that is open to interpretation and could be misconstrued. I have replaced this subhead with the term “Planned” and clarified its meaning in the accompanying subtext.

More generally, I write this response as the principle editor of the page over the past few years, having devoted a significant amount of time to developing it. If you want to see the difference, check out the state of the page in 2020! Of course, Wiki is a community-based project founded on discussion and input and I do not expect any degree of exclusivity over the page. All I ask, respectfully, is that any further observations are fair and considered.

Further to my own appeal, I would like to highlight the template “Infobox skyline” that LivinAWestLife has created for the List of tallest buildings pages. While I think the principle is an excellent one, I find an issue with the template format in three respects: firstly, there is a critical concern with the building tallies (e.g. Taller than 50 metres, Taller than 100 metres, Taller than 150 metres, etc.) because the taller buildings appear to be double-counted – i.e. 150m+ buildings are also counted as 100m+ buildings, and so on. This is a confusion I feel needs to be addressed. Secondly, I personally think it would be sensible for the tallies to be reordered so they read high-to-low (i.e. 150m, 100m, 50m), mirroring the format of the listings. Lastly, my personal preference would be for the template image to fill the space to the border rather than ‘floating’ in white space, although I understand if this is based on a standard Wiki template. BlueandWhiteStripes (talk) 19:40, 28 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

To add to my points on your talk page, I should mention you yourself state that choosing 35 metres was a choice of personal preference. It is really unreasonable that this page as measured in kilobye size (currently sitting at 416 KB) is one and a half times longer than the one for, say, New York City (263 KB). Both this page and the title is too long.
Thank you for changing “emergent” to “planned” however, I do think that is clearer.
Addressing the infobox: it would be much more unintuitive if buildings in a higher height range did not include the ones in the lower ones. To find out how many buildings a city has over a given height, one only has to look. If we use a 50-100 m range as you propose instead, then the viewer would have to add the numbers up. Finding the number of buildings above a given height is also trivial when looking at the main table (I should note every single tall building page besides this one puts all their buildings in the same table – because they have lists of a reasonable length).
As for the high-to-low or low-to-high order, I don’t have a strong preference either way.
If you want the image to be more space-filling, you can do so by writing it as a file and then specifying the image size, for example:
| image = [[File:Detroit_International_Riverfront_from_the_Detroit_River,_Windsor,_Ontario,_2025-07-27.jpg|270px]] LivinAWestLife (talk) 16:13, 1 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
If my unilateral edits were contetentious then it should reasonable that I would meet more opposition when cleaning these pages, but Seattle is the only page where someone had an issue with it. For context, he had an issue too when I tried to extend the short lead, which was also about five years out of date. Another difference was that in none of those cases was the article indutibly long, so I didn’t have to remove any content. LivinAWestLife (talk) 16:17, 1 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Also, this is worth mentioning: it was you who unilaterally changed the article title from the reasonably-lengthed “List of tallest buildings and structures in Birmingham” to the current one. It was you who unilaterally changed the height cutoff from the 50 metres to 35 metres when the existing list then was already quite long. All of this can be seen by checking the last version of the page in 2020 before you started to edit it. And for the past four years you have made over 90% of edits to the page. Everything you are accusing me of is behaviour you have demonstrated yourself. On Wikipedia, articles are not owned. LivinAWestLife (talk) 16:41, 1 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I have edited this page to help improve it; guilty as charged. This is the point of Wikipedia, is it not?
However, the edits I have made affect this page and this page only. They are intended to benefit those with an interest in the urban fabric of the Birmingham city-region. Fundamentally, the page fits the template of others of its type – the only significant difference is its detail and rigour.
Conversely, what you have done is embark on a personal “project” which affects tens if not hundreds of Wiki pages. Your explicitly stated goal is to treat Wiki as your own free-to-view skyscraper platform because the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) site is a subscription service and the SkyscraperPage.com Forum is poorly designed. As you are surely aware, this is not Wikipedia’s raison d’etre and is a clear breach of its community guidelines.
Moreover, having commenced your project to great fanfare but with little-to-no WP:CON, you are now getting stroppy with editors who are refusing to fall into line – including me. In my case, you have laboured diffuse arguments across several pages in attempt to enforce your POV and your tone has become increasingly WP:UNCIVIL. The is not reasonable behaviour and I would ask you to desist.
Fishing around in the gloop, I gather you have taken issue with the following: metropolitan boundaries, comparative city sizes, unclustered skylines, arbitrary building height cut-offs, lengths of lists, lengths of page titles, churches-as-structures, people disagreeing with you. Am I missing anything?
For avoidance of doubt, I will repost the reply I gave to you on my Talk Page, which was written before your posts above, but sets out my position, which is unchanged:
“The Birmingham page, like London and others, is entitled “Tall buildings and structures…”. Churches are structures, the last time I checked. You do not get to decide this – the convention is already in place.
Regarding other regional UK city pages, I would suggest that the omission of lower height buildings is due to a lack of time or interest on the part of other editors, or a lack of readily transferable data. Neither is an issue here. If a 47-metre building appears prominently next to a 53-metre building on the Birmingham skyline, which it does, it makes no sense to include one but exclude the other. By the same token, a 47-metre building in West Bromwich is undoubtedly a “tall building” in its urban environment. Parts of Sandwell are as close to Birmingham as Salford is to Manchester, by the way.
Again, you are not in a position to dictate how the urban morphology of every city-region is represented by comparing it to NYC or wherever else. While Birmingham, West Midlands (County) and the Birmingham Metro Area all have separate, verifiable Wiki pages, there can be no argument about this. None whatsoever.
Equally, the content of the page listings are appropriate for Wiki: you have clearly misunderstand WP:DIRECTORY so I suggest you revisit the clauses. In terms of WP:SIZE, the Greater Manchester (Note, not Manchester) page includes a single list with more than 200 separate descriptive entries, far in excess of the NYC page or, indeed, any single list on the Birmingham Metro page. Am I to assume you are intending to apply WP:SIZE to the GM page by setting a minimum height limit of, say, 75-metres? Hmm?
To be clear, I am not refusing to consider a “change” to any page. I am refusing to accept your WP:RECKLESS proposal to delete huge chunks of relevant information on the Birmingham Metro page as part of a misguided formalisation process; one in which you continually refuse to heed any advice or acknowledge any concerns, including those I originally set out on the Birmingham Metro page and reiterated on the Infobox template page. This is WP:IMADEIT writ large and with your WP:REVERT of my template edit you have demonstrated your methods in practice.
I repeat: it is completely unreasonable to make substantial changes an entire genre of pages without proper WP:CON with the regular contributors to those pages. The Wiki community guidelines could not be clearer on this.
I would encourage you to take a step backwards and consider your approach.”
Given the nature of your “project” as described above, I suspect further engagement around any of these issues will prove futile. I suggest, therefore, we WP:DISENGAGE per Wiki’s protocol, for the time being.
If after this time you are still determined to delete chunks of this page, we will need to WP:SEEKHELP through a formal dispute resolution. BlueandWhiteStripes (talk) 11:02, 2 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I see no issue with continuing our conversation solely on here.
Should I remind you that I have never attempted to remove any content from this page, only ask politely in this talk page, and all I have done is to revert a single (I repeat, single) edit you have made to the infobox which I explained my rationale? In response you proceed to accuse me and to try to throw every Wikipedia policy to have in an attempt to justify your arguments.
There are no regular contributors to this page other than yourself. It is not unreasonable to think you have an interest in maintaining this page and its contents. In contrast, after I edit the various tall building pages and making improvements such as tidying the image sizes, adding coordinates, adding sources to every building, I keep a light touch and I am not opposed to editors changing the content of what I have wrote if it needs and improvement or is detrimental to the wiki.
You have misunderstood WP:CON as well as all the other Wikipedia policies you tried to cite. These pages are for collecting and viewing a city’s skyscrapers and other tall structures. What about making them easier and more informative is controversial? If the other two websites where this can be done have their own glaring problems, that is simply a rationale for making these Wikipedia lists better. If CTBUH was perfect it wouldn’t preclude improving these articles regardless, providing more context than a directory would have. That’s basically the same thing you have done as well, the fact of the matter is only that the list is too long.
Many editors on Wikipedia have specific interests and thus like to edit articles of that subject.
To reiterate, I have never violated WP:CON since I have never unilaterally deleted chunks of this article. I merely suggested that it could be shortened. I started a discussion on the talk page as was usual procedure. If this is your reaction to any opposition you meet on this cite, I am worried about your further conduct as an editor in other pages. I repeat, once again, the only tangible thing I have done is revert a single edit you have made to the infobox. LivinAWestLife (talk) 15:29, 2 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

List of tallest buildings and structures in the Birmingham Metropolitan Area, West Midlands → List of tallest buildings and structures in BirminghamList of tallest buildings and structures in Birmingham – This is by far the longest title for a tallest buildings page, and runs afoul of WP:CONCISE and WP:TITLECON, given that the closest comparable city, Manchester, is titled tallest in “Greater Manchetser”, and other lists have the form of “List of tallest buildings (and structures) in [city]”. For example, the Leeds page is “tallest buildings and structures in Leeds”, and not “in the Leeds metropolitan area, West Yorkshire”, and does not include Bradford. This double naming is analagous to a tautology and fails to be precise and natural, as it is unlikely anyone looking up this list will type in such a long title.

This page was unilaterally moved by an editor in 2021 without prior discussion, and since then he has expanded the scope of the article without seeking any consensus to cover tall buildings across the entire metropolitan county of West Midlands. This was how the article looked like before. The height cutoff has also been lowered to 50 metres to 35 without discussion, necessitating the inclusion of more buildings. As a result this list is now one of the longest “tallest buildings” lists on Wikipedia, lengthier than the article for New York City. The article is also visually messy with two columns showing separate ranks. The current height cutoff of 35 metres would include every single high-rise and church in the whole county, which is unreasonably for a major city like Birmingham, and does not fulfill WP:DIRECTORY or WP:SIZE. I have politely pointed out that this article might be too long and suggested to change the height cutoff to 50 m as before.

In addition, it is unusual for “tall building” articles cover the entire metropolitan area; we have separate pages for New York City and Jersey City; for Miami and Sunny Isles Beach, and for Toronto and Mississauga. As stated previously, Leeds’ page does not cover Bradford’s, and Glasgow’s only covers the city of Glasgow. There are exceptions for only when most of an area’s tallest buildings are located outside of its main city, as for Washington D.C. and Paris. In addition, this page covers Coventry, which is not part of the same urban area and is geographically and culturally distinct from Birmingham.

I propose a move back to the original name and a possible WP:SPLIT into List of tallest buildings and structures in Coventry and List of tallest buildings and structures in the Black Country, so as to not remove a lot of content on this page. The issue of the article’s length has been previously brought up by User:Pigsonthewing and others in the talk page.

As there is one primary editor for the page for the preceding four years, I understand that this editor is motivated to prevent a change to the height limit, or a reversion of his changes, including such a move. I would like to seek consensus for more editors on if this move is appropriate.

I should add I no longer wish to separate buildings and structures on this list from a prior talk page discussion I started.

LivinAWestLife (talk) 16:06, 2 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I proposed, politely, that we should WP:DISENGAGE, but instead you chose to escalate. So be it.
Firstly, your rationale is flawed; deeply so. You state the closest comparative city to Birmingham in terms of size is Greater Manchester. This is incorrect. The City of Birmingham is considerably larger than the City of Manchester. The closest comparison – and it is a very close comparison – are the Metropolitan counties of the West Midlands and Greater Manchester.
Therefore, we can make a reasonable comparison between the two Wikipedia pages, yes? Let’s take a look:
List of tallest buildings and structures in Greater Manchester
  • This page covers the buildings and structures in all ten metropolitan boroughs of Greater Manchester.
  • It currently consists of nine separate lists with a total of 451 detailed entries.
  • This Birmingham Metro page, to which you have taken particular exception, covers the buildings and structures in the six metropolitan boroughs of the West Midlands.
  • It currently contains eleven separate lists with a total of 580 entries, of which only around 400 are detailed.
Hence, unless you are proposing to split the Greater Manchester tall buildings page into three or more distinct urban regions to suit your WP:SIZE requirements, you have contradicted your own rationale. Hell, maybe you should go ahead and split the London page into the City of London and its 32 boroughs. I actually live in one which has some grass between it and the City of London, so maybe my community is “geographically and culturally distinct” for the purposes of the tall buildings page.
I am sorry, but this is total nonsense.
Over and above this, the Birmingham Metro has three further considerations of which you are either genuinely ignorant, or being deliberately obtuse.
The first is that when you exit the Greater Manchester authority you soon find yourself in an another metro region: either Merseyside, to the West, or one of the two Yorkshire metros across the Peak District. Hence, Greater Manchester’s hinterland is relatively constrained. This is not the case for the West Midlands, which is surrounded by reasonably-sized settlements such as Redditch, Bromsgrove, Tamworth, Warwick, Nuneaton, and others, which make up the wider Birmingham Metropolitan Area. I included the parts of those authorities that fall within the Metro Area because I felt it may be interesting and informative to some – giving particular thought to the people who live there.
The total number of additional entries, however, number no more than a couple of dozen, and I have made the distinctions clear using a colour-coding mechanism. Is this really such a big deal?
The second issue, of course, is that the world contains more than one city called Birmingham. When I began editing the page in 2020, the distinction between Birmingham and Birmingham, Alabama was made primarily by disambiguation, which was obviously not ideal. Thus, it seemed a sensible approach to rename this page to incorporate the Metro Area, without creating further confusion by naming it “Tallest Buildings and Structures in the West Midlands” – which, in case you are unaware, is the name of both the Metropolitan County and the Region. Then to automatically redirect “Tallest Buildings and Structures in Birmingham” to it, which I did. Thus, there is no need for anyone to type the full page title to reach the page.
Lastly, much of the Birmingham Metro Area, particularly the Black Country region in which I was born, is composed of a constellation of towns knitted together into an urban fabric. A building in any one of these towns which exceeds 35-metres (circa 12-storeys) will be a landmark tall building on that skyline. Just because the building in question is not a 400-metre glass edifice does not make it irrelevant; certainly not in the local context.
This was my rationale for developing the page in the way that I have, and the very fact that nobody else routinely contributed to the page meant I felt able to make these edits without WP:CON. For the benefit of the Wiki community, I stick to editing what I know well. Please do not make baseless accusations about my motivations as an editor. This is the second time I have had to pull you up on WP:UNCIVIL. I will not ask you again.
With regards to your cherry picking distinct metro areas (e.g. New York City/Jersey City), I can just as readily cite metro areas where the greater region has been consolidated. For example, the City of Sydney and the metropolitan region of Greater Western Sydney. Sydney’s tallest buildings page includes buildings in Parramatta, a city 25km to the West of Sydney CBD with a completely separate skyline. I know this because I used to live there. Another example, which is especially pertinent to this discussion, are the Zonas of Rio de Janeiro. I note you have created one of your little maps for Zona Centro and excluded the rest of the city from it. Anyone who has lived in Rio, as I have, knows that the greatest concentration of tall buildings is located in Zona Sul, strung around the beaches from Botafogo to Ipanema, and extending on to Zona Barra da Tijuca via a very big, very green and very non-urbanised mountain. This is why your map does not even include the majority of tall buildings in the city.
You see, this is what I have been trying to impress upon you from the get-go. You cannot force the idealised template you created for New York City onto each and every tall buildings page in order to meet your “cleaning up” agenda. Not only are you compromising the integrity of multiple pages, but you are wasting people’s time by continuing to escalate your barely Civil POV-pushing; and doing so from an increasingly compromised position.
You informed me curtly that on Wikipedia, articles are not owned. Neither, I might retort, are templated pages. It is becoming clear that you are pursuing a personal vendetta here and I would strongly advise you to desist. BlueandWhiteStripes (talk) 22:12, 2 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

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