Between 1950 and 1971 Birmingham City Council built 464 housing blocks of five or more storeys. The city pursued parallel programmes of building high-rise flats both in the central areas on slum cleared land and in its suburbs on greenfield sites. Examining Birmingham's post-war suburban housing programme, this article suggests that the use of high-rise in suburban areas represented an important change in the nature of British cities, both in the use of a particular building type on the urban fringe and also in the location of high-density workers' housing far outside of the city core.