[untog]

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.

[NickPollard]

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!

[ajb]

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