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Comment by dav-id | Hacker News Reader

If I was a person from outside of the UK and looking to setup a business in the UK I would absolutely not choose London as my base! I understand all of the reasons in favour of London but I think there are better alternatives. London is full of the type of people who like to make a lot of noise but get little done, costs are extortionate and you can get most of the benefit of London from outside.

My personal choices would be a city along one of the major rail routes into London or one of the major University cities. So they would be Bath, Bristol, Oxford, Cambridge and perhaps Birmingham / Warwick. In fact most of these cities have their own start up friendly environments that are linked with the universities and plenty of VC and PE firms in those cities. All of which are less expensive and much more welcoming and friendly places to be, less ego too!

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So they would be Bath, Bristol, Oxford, Cambridge and perhaps Birmingham / Warwick.

As someone who grew up in Bath (and spent a lot of time in Bristol), let me tell you: you're going to have a very hard time convincing people to move to those cities. There really isn't much going on there.

London might be where people "make a lot of noise but get little done" (citation needed) but it's also the central hub of business, commerce and transport in the country. You can apply everything you just said to New York and Silicon Valley, yet they remain the top places to set up a business in the USA. There are very good reasons for that.

Maybe not in Bath, but there are a lot of startups in Cambridge, and have been since the '80s.

London is certainly a level above every other city in the UK, but as a graduate of Bristol University it's definitely one of the few places in the UK I'd consider living outside London, and seems like it has a lot going for it for the startup crowd. A lot of creative businesses, good culture, youthful, energetic, but still big enough to be interesting and close enough to London for when it's needed.

The University of Bristol is very keen on entrepreneurship too, especially the Engineering + CompSci departments - they're responsible for getting me interested in the whole thing in the first place!

On the other hand, London has more developers than anywhere else in the country, probably both in density & absolute numbers. Pretty much every UK startup I've heard of is located in London.

Yes, it's horribly expensive, but so is SF & SF remains the startup capital of the US.

Strangely Cambridge is the start up place in the UK. They get the most venture funding (even over London). Then tend to be in fairly hardcore technology though. I would call it Europes silicon valley, and not choke too much laughing, with ARM and related companies there.

All the giant advertising agencies are in London, so it makes sense for Google. They're also in New york and elsewhere too - so I don't think that part gains them much.

The UK is the second biggest market for Google, and they pay about 4% tax apparently on that profit. So I think this office was part of an arrangement with the government.

Late follow up: sure, many non-software startups are elsewhere, especially in Cambridge (I used to work for a biotech startup in Cam.) Software / web startups seem to be predominantly in London though. (Maybe the London ones are just noisier?)

> one of the major University cities. So they would be Bath, Bristol, Oxford, Cambridge and perhaps Birmingham / Warwick.

Don't discount Manchester (University of Manchester + incubators, University of Salford, Manchester Met), Leeds (University of Leeds, Leeds Met), Sheffield (University of Sheffield, Sheffield Hallam), and Liverpool (University of Liverpool, Liverpool Hope). Rail and road links between those cities and between those cities and London are of good quality, and should be improved in the future, not forgetting the fact that they're equidistant between London and Scottish cities!

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