[TheOtherHobbes]

London is a handful of very pleasant millionaire villages - Primrose Hill, Hampstead & Highgate, Ken + Chel etc - surrounded by terraced Edwardian worker slums.

There's also been a new build boom in the East. Some areas were almost affordable for a while.

The big advantage compared to the rest of the UK is networking potential. Even the biggest competing cities - Manchester, Birmingham - are an order of magnitude less happening. And places like Leeds and Swindon have almost nothing at all.

The UK has really screwed the proverbial pooch here. Compared to traditional industry, Internet and creative businesses have huge potential for almost no infrastructure spend, and can create jobs almost everywhere.

Aggressively promoting startups across the country should have been a no-brainer. But... that's not what we got.

[makomk]

The other smaller startup city is Cambridge, which in some ways is even worse - less dense housing and a complete lack of decent transport links in of any kind, because all our transportation centers on London.