How London became the rest of the world’s startup capital
(economist.com)225 points by ellieh 5 days ago
225 points by ellieh 5 days ago
The Elizabeth Line, formerly known as Crossrail, is a lot more similar to the hundred year plan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossrail
My dad was a tunnels engineer and worked on Crossrail feasibility studies at several points in his career across decades.
London is is many ways one of the less impressive subway systems simply because much of it is so old, with small trains running in Victorian era tunnels. Not as bad as the Glasgow one, which feels like travelling on a 2/3 scale model of a subway with alarmingly narrow platforms.
It is however a point of contention within the UK that London public transport is better than public transport in almost every other city, due to being properly nationalized.
> Not as bad as the Glasgow one, which feels like travelling on a 2/3 scale model of a subway with alarmingly narrow platforms.
For anyone who's not aware, the Glasgow Subway is literally smaller - the track gauge is 4ft (85% of standard gauge), and the rolling stock (trains) is similarly scaled down, to the point that you probably have to duck if you're over 6ft.
Half the Berlin lines are weirdly narrow, but not short.
To americans, London public transport feels amazing. To rest of Europe, its lets say OKish
To people who have to commute to London, particularly if it's not a mainline train, it's tragically bad and overpriced. Train outages happen on a daily basis, the fare is very expensive compared to mainland Europe and the quality is quite a bit worse.
It's a pretty extensive system and the pretty new Elizabeth Line is great. But if you take something like the Piccadilly Line in from the airport, you probably shouldn't have a lot of luggage because a lot of stations just have stairs and platforms are often at a significant offset from the underground cars. (The double decker busses also work pretty well although they're not generally my default.)
> a lot of stations just have stairs
Very few, if any. They may not have escalators (Covent garden, for eg., but no-one in their right mind uses that - just use Leicester Square and walk on the street) but there are almost always ways of getting up to the street, and assistance is signposted for people with problems.
> platforms are often at a significant offset from the underground cars
Not sure what you mean here - mind the gap? Typically less on the Piccadilly than some other lines - Bank on the Central is particularly scary.
Based on living 30-odd years in London, most of it using the Piccadilly line on my daily commute and to get to LHR.
Sounding like a TfL groupie here, but it is a pretty good transit system, given geographic and budgetary constraints.
It's not just the gap. The platform can also be a somewhat significant step up from the car. Normally not a big deal but a couple years back I had both real dress clothing and clothes for a long walk in my luggage on a fairly long trip overall.
Agree that the Underground is good in general. I've used it a lot. That particular trip was just a case of having heavier luggage than I usually carry and I should have handled things differently.
I'll be visiting Glasgow in May, and very much hope I'll have a chance to visit the miniature subway. Third ever built, first to be called a "subway", never expanded since it opened in 1896 - how can you not love a system like that?
Thin air? It was delivered 3 years late and cost £5bn more than it should have. While projects like HS2 to the North are scaled back. The UK uses other parts of the county as a piggy bank to fund London projects.
I have a dog in this fight as I'm quite close to the public transport industry in the North and it's pretty disheartening to see politicans use us as some sort of "policy win" and then never follow through with it. Manchester only recently got devolved powers meaning the region did not have to get approval from Westminster on how they use their money and the bus and tram system has completely improved in the sapce of a couple of years (unified tickets, tap and go) with the suburban rail to come into that this year.
What is also interesting is that London's productivity growth is falling compared to Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool. So those cities that aren't getting the fancy new train lines are actually performing better.
> The UK uses other parts of the county as a piggy bank to fund London projects.
it's the exact opposite
Although Yes CrossRail was partly funded by a levy on London homes and businesses, London get's more funding per capita for public transport than anywhere else in the country
Imagine what we achieve if we invested London levels of money in transport across the rest of the country
This is demonstrably false. The data shows the exact opposite.
Transport spending in London was £1,313 per capita in 2023/24, compared with just £368 per head in the East Midlands[0] - nearly 4x the investment. Over the decade to 2022/23, if the North had received the same per person transport spending as London, it would have received £140 billion more[1]. The East Midlands got just £355 per person, the lowest of every nation and region[1].
Yes, London generates a fiscal surplus, but that's a self-fulfilling prophecy. London receives the highest investment spending for both economic and non-economic areas, relative to population size[2]. In 2022, infrastructure construction spend in London was £8.8 billion, whilst Scotland came second with £3.6 billion[3].
It's circular logic:
* invest heavily in London
-> infrastructure drives productivity
-> higher productivity generates more tax revenue
-> claim London 'subsidises' other regions
-> use this to justify more London investment.
Infrastructure investment enhances productive potential[4], but all other regions are systematically denied it.
London has returns on investment because it's the only place that actually gets proper investment. You can't starve regions of infrastructure for decades, watch their productivity stagnate, then point to London's tax surplus as proof they are subsidising others, that's fucking stupid.
---
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1134495/transport-spendi...
[1] https://www.ippr.org/media-office/ippr-north-and-ippr-reveal...
[2] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn06...
[3] https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/economicoutputandproductivity...
[4] https://www.bennettschool.cam.ac.uk/blog/what-role-infrastru...
It's based on the Centre for Cities report: "How productive are the UK's big cities?" which mentions Liverpool's, Leed's and Manchester's productivity growth and The State of London Report 2025 which reports London's productivity decline
https://www.centreforcities.org/publication/how-productive-a...
https://data.london.gov.uk/blog/the-state-of-london-report-2...
Right as an American this reads like "American who's never been to large Asian cities like Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing etc..
I'm with you. Tokyo is incredible. It's the only large city I've ever been to where I left thinking, "I'd love to live there."
Transportation in Japan is a whole other level compared to my experiences in Germany and Austria.
I've never been to England, though, so can't make that comparison.
I think the fundamental issue here is that many in America don't actually want dense cities, public transit, and more generally shared spaces. I, for one, would not want to live in condo when I can live in a house. When enough people want this, you end up with "urban sprawl" and one or more cars per house.
A big problem in America is the entrenchment that is happening. People are becoming so polarised there is no common ground left for discussions and people aren't open to new ideas or thinking.
I genuinely feel I can't even discuss this with many Americans. They stalwartly believe car culture is superior in every single aspect, any deviation from this narrative is simply met with 'you don't understand'.
I recall in Ireland they asked an American on public TV what he thought of one of the few pedestrians only streets in Dublin (Liffey Street). He pointed out that he would be sorry for the loss of the trade on that street for the business involved compared to if cars were allowed to drive on it. It's then pointed out they make way more money since the transition as it's a city centre location with enormous footfall.
He just counters that's not possible and cited some example in the US.
There was a big argument on my local (American) Nextdoor recently because someone encountered a line of cars on a road that had recently had a bike lane added to it. People were outraged about bike lanes. And not just in the sense that they had to pay (via taxes) for something they didn't feel was useful. The fact that the lane even existed was an affront. They seemed to actually believe that the bike lane caused delays for cars merely by existing.
As I understand it the US car lobby had a big hand in designing modern America, in such a way that for most cities it really isn't possible to use anything else.
On the other hand a lot of European cities were laid out in the time of horse and cart.
I think it is widely known that public transport in the US is god awful. Public transportation is lovely in most European countries, IMO.
It isn’t universally awful in the US. Washington, DC’s system is great and should be the cornerstone of any revitalization that isn’t so reliant on the federal government.
DC's system is OK. It suffers from being both a commuter rail system and a city transit system mashed together. It needs more tracks so that maintenance can be performed without massive delays and so express trains can be run. Coverage is lacking. It's good if you're going places it serves, but there are a lot of places it doesn't go, like Georgetown. And the hub-and-spoke model makes it quite painful for a relatively decentralized city. Going between, say, Bethesda and Tysons is physically possible but takes ages because you have to go all the way downtown first.
It gets a lot of things right and is great if it has a good route for the trips you want to make when you want to make it, but mostly it shines because the situation is so much worse in any other American city that's not New York and maybe Chicago.
Thanks, good to know! How are the trains across the country though?
It's pretty good in NYC. I heard it's nice in Boston too.
If they ran the suburban rail more frequently Boston would have a phenomenal system.
Some bits about the service can be pretty astounding.
I used to live near the Central line. The station near home was open air and the exit was at the very end of the platform, so I always wanted to make sure I entered the train from the correct end. Service on the Central line is frequent enough (24 trains per hour off-peak), that, if I hopped off the train from the wrong end, the time it took me to walk the length of the platform was long enough for the next train to arrive.
I've lived in London for a decade, and feel incredibly lucky to have access to the transit here - having lived in Aus, NZ and Canada previously.
It's not perfect. It's late sometimes, pollution sucks, and often crowded - but people here who like to criticise it really don't recognise how much better they have it than lots of other places.
Same with travel from here to Europe (by train), is just awesome.
> Under the project name of Crossrail, the system was approved in 2007, and construction began in 2009. Originally planned to open in 2018, the project was repeatedly delayed [...] The service is named after Queen Elizabeth II, who officially opened the line on 17 May 2022[...].
I wouldn't say thin air, exactly.
>> I wouldn't say thin air, exactly.
Fair but have you seen how long things take in the US? The original proposal for the 2nd ave line was in 1920 and they have only managed to deploy four stops. I read about it in the news when I was in 5th grade and still read about it now, 40yrs later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Avenue_Subway
Similar for the Hudson tunnel which is supposed to allow commuter trains to function w/o the current madness...
The Elizabeth Line was unbelievably expensive to build; that's how the UK did it.
>> The Elizabeth Line was unbelievably expensive to build; that's how the UK did it.
Fair. But what is also expensive is every single citizen taking $100 Uber rides to the airport, like in NYC. In NJ, the transit service has become so volatile and sporadic and opaque that people have reduced NJTransit use for Newark airport in favor of simply driving.
That cost doesn't show up on government books, so we can pretend it doesn't exist. The joys of decentral planning.
We don't have to pretend it doesn't exist. It actually doesn't cost the taxpayer anything.
But it is also really good. I love the completely enclosed platforms, ie shielded from the track and train by a glass wall/doors, like the Jubilee line, but all the way to the ceiling. This makes it both safe and very quiet.
Though the platforms are huge, as the trains are long, you have to really make a conscious decision on which exit to use as they come up very far from each other. Unlike other tube stations, where if you don't pick the most optimal exit, you just have to cross the road.
Yes national money once again mostly being spent in London. Coincidentally where these decisions are made.
having done a lot of work on it in a previous career, I can confirm that it was born out or no shortage of blood, sweat and signalling snafus.
And for a city that wants to be a global startup hub, that kind of frictionless mobility matters way more than people realize
Many European cities have this. London has the biggest, though. And Asian cities. Paris has a metro, Berlin has a metro, Tokyo has a metro, many cities in China but that information is a bit less accessible.
China built an entire national high speed rail network while America was waiting to see if the Hyperloop was anything.
I live in a big continental European city that also has a start-up hub. The companies here are also small, creative, solving problems, but don't necessarily aim for an exit and growth at all costs, many of them want to create a sustainable business solving a need that people have.
I think, to the economist, these are just SMEs and a start-up is about making money, an IPO, an exit, the unicorns. And of course London as one of the largest financial hubs will be a good place to start such a business.
But I've always thought of these "SME"-type start-ups as belonging to the start-up category too; after all they "start up" a company and often have ambitious goals and creative, tech driven approaches to solving problems. This is how I've thought it would work when I was younger, and it is how I still think it'd be good to do today, and how I'd try to build a company if I have a good idea to pursue.
Anyways, the point I want to make re the article is that I think the definition is narrow, leaves out a bunch of interesting companies, and thus skews the picture towards London. There are plenty of innovative places around Europe, it's just a different model of doing start-ups. IMO this overly financially motivated view onto the start-up world is quite a bit less interesting than a the broader (maybe harder to quantify) picture.
I think you're right that the ambitions in Europe are smaller and I'd say more likely healthier for those involved and maybe the world in general. I have spent some time working in a start up hub in Scandinavia and there was the usual talk of innovation, disruption, work hard, etc... but by 4:30 the offices were empty and people had gone home to their families. Work life balance still came first.
Any time you use the word startup you are already ceding ground. Startup as a term solves the problem of the VC: given technology is inherently risky, how do I get good returns? Answer: make sure the winner keeps doubling down. Create a culture around valorizing the few big, big winners and writing off-- financially and mentally-- the losers.
14 years ago now: https://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html
Of course, this culture is less helpful for individuals and cities, who have to live with the volatility.
I feel that these shouldn't be alternatives. Calling something startup is up to the definition that we use; one that I like is the following:
A startup is a temporary operating model designed to discover a repeatable, scalable, and profitable business.
A company that just started that can scale to 100M evaluation in less than 5 years.
A seed round of million of dollars might not make sense for a flower shop, but could be reasonable if you plan to develop the next generation B2B flower shop SaaS integration.
Why should it grow to 100M in 5 years?
A business can make $500k profit per year, with two employees, forever, and that's a moderate success. Sqlite is doing just that. And they're not captured by exponential growth, they're not going boom or bust filling sqlite with advertisements and AI. They just make a solid product that works. Is that bad?
Nobody's saying that's bad. but it's not a startup. A "startup" is defined by growth. https://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html
Businesses that don't have the ambition to grow very quickly should not take venture capital. It's a waste of everyone's time and energy
Whether the company targets or not that goal is a major distinction.
For example if I open a restaurant I'm 100% guaranteed not to be valued 100M in 5 years.
If I target to be the next social network and compete with TikTok, then it's a startup.
Goal, ability to scale, global business from the onset, etc. are things you can perceive today without being able to read the future.
Europe has plenty of cities that are great if your goal is "build something useful, make money, don't sell your soul," and those don’t show up in these charts
That probably applies to many cities of economically advanced (or even less advanced) countries. I think the (Anglo-Saxon) startup narrative for too long has been about growth at all cost, go big or die trying, sell out your company as early as possible to VCs and be essentially employed by them as a founder. Starting a normal innovative, profit-making company and growing it sustainably is just non-news, unfortunately.
I really hate the exponential growth every year, which is physically impossible, instead of a plain "sustainable business solving a need that people have." as you mention.
Naturally as soon as the need is covered, and there are no new people to sell the product to, the exponential growth every year mentality bursts into entshitification, or firing half of the company because the targets weren't reached, but no worries at least the shareholders are happy.
Maybe it is my European mindset that cannot grasp this MBA mindset into creating /destroying jobs as if people didn't matter.
I mean, I do slightly appreciate this (not all businesses need to grow 10X every year to succeed), but the other way of phrasing it is that London produces lots of business that generates lots of money.
Is this really surprising? London picks up all the advantages of the UK (legal system is sound, eg in contract law, native speakers of English, the lingua franca of business, strong university tradition) and adds in its special sauce: access to the City, global-tier culture, excellent public transport (I know we moan about it, but it really is excellent), and a timezone location that easily serves the US and Asia markets.
The awkwardness for founders in London is that when they want to IPO, London doesnt have nearly as deep a pool of capital as the US, so they are potentially leaving a lot of money on the table.
US founders have essentially outsourced risk to London.
> What London actually built is Europe’s most efficient farm system for US acquirers. The city does the expensive, risky work of finding founders, funding early rounds, and proving product-market fit. American companies wait until the risk is de-risked, then buy the winners at discounts enabled by London’s shrinking public markets.
It's a classic example of how natural advantages and network effects can overcome mediocre to poor policymaking.
The UK has been run by blithering idiots for decades at this point, but London has survived so far
Maybe the UK has been run by blithering idiots but the business environment and regulations are still among the most attractive in Europe... not sure what that says about the other European countries.
In Germany you need 25k$ and 6-12 months to establish the equivalent of an LLC. This is because Germany hates limited liability. It would prefer you to operate as a sole trader with unlimited liability, and then not do things that generate liability. Needless to say, this is scary for programmers.
Indeed, I can't speak for how other European countries work but if the Labour/Conservative/Whitehall nomenklatura is producing better results than your political system, something is very very wrong
right, people will just tell you the best places and things to invest in ...
during a game of chess: "hey why'd you make that move?"
"hey why'd you make that bid?" is a valid question that must be answered during a game of bridge..
I don't know bridge and I did not google. Would you be so kind to be verbose? Your comment made me curious ... but I was busy
UK Anti‑Corruption Plan 2014-2015
Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Act 2015 - outlawed bearer shares
UK PSC Registry 2016
Action Plan for Anti‑Money Laundering and Counter‑Terrorist Finance 2017-2022
Money Laundering Regulations 2017
Sanctions and Anti‑Money Laundering Act 2018
London ends up being this amazing on-ramp into global tech, but not quite the place where the biggest companies finish their journey
Plus SEIS is the most insanely generous investment tax relief
Is deep enough pool of capital for the vast majority of businesses.
Its cultural diversity is a plus for most people (other than people like DHH).
The big problem with London is that it is very, very expensive.
> Its cultural diversity is a plus for most people
Cultural diversity is not a draw. Africa, Latin America, and Central Asia are all culturally and ethnically diverse. No one moves to any of these places.
The primary draw of a city like London is economic prosperity, which is ironically usually only made possible by ethnic homogeneity. This is the case in Britain’s former colonies (USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand), China, Saudi Arabia, etc.
Target cities become “culturally diverse” due to the arrival of migrant labor. The migrant labor itself is not seeking this diversity out for its own sake. New migrants have their movements facilitated by networks of already-landed migrants, who provide knowledge of the immigration process, employment opportunities, and material assistance to their coethnics.
These people are not moving to London because they can find people like themselves there (there are already plenty in their country of origin), nor are they moving to London because they want to experience other cultures (this was a form of conspicuous consumption that went out of fashion years ago). At best you could say they hope that the relative ethnic heterogeneity will distract from their own foreignness, but that still doesn’t amount to being drawn to diversity.
> This is the case in Britain’s former colonies (USA
The USA was never a colony of britain. The american colonies were.
> The primary draw of a city like London is economic prosperity
Then tokyo or singapore or dubai would have been even greater draws. But they are not.
What becomes a "tech capital" is primarily a political decision. If london is a major tech center, it's because of political decisions within britain but primarily outside of britain ( the US ).
> The USA was never a colony of britain. The american colonies were.
This is inane.
> Then tokyo or singapore or dubai would have been even greater draws. But they are not.
This doesn’t logically follow, but even if it did, Tokyo is an attractive destination for immigrants, even with the Japanese being notoriously xenophobic. Japan is homogenous and economically prosperous, the difference is that it restricts migrants from entering. Singapore has a huge population of day laborers that live in Malaysia and commute to Singapore. The majority of Dubai’s population is comprised of foreign laborers.
> If london is a major tech center, it's because of political decisions within britain but primarily outside of britain ( the US ).
And how do those decisions get made in the absence of a cohesive society capable of making them?
To add on this, ethnic heterogeneity (and ethnic enclaves) is one of the shallowest forms of diversity. If you examine the diversity regarding district characteristics and architecture, shopping options, subcultures, etc, many homogenous cities like Tokyo or Hong Kong are far greater and accommodating than London in diversity.
And I would say that one reason for that is the elements I mention is something an individual can take seriously and integrate into their own world, while enclaves stay perpetually from the vantage of exoticism rather than integration.
Housing is super expensive, but even that is coming down. Transport is a bit expensive, bit it's fine. Everything else is pretty reasonable!
Is it really coming down? Only in London, UK, Europe, or more or less globally? Where are you getting this from?
I am not sure everything else is reasonable if groceries alone have been going up by as much as 100% throughout the world, heh. Maybe on an SWE salary it is reasonable, sure.
Is it reasonable to say that in many (not all) parts of London, English no longer functions reliably as the default public language, even if most individuals technically "speak English"?
Across most of the world, people who do not share a common native language will speak English to each other. London is no different.
What this is, is a racist meme pretending that the significant fraction of immigrants to London who may occasionally speak their native language to each other in public is somehow a problem. Exactly equivalent to Americans panicking about Spanish.
I think the "Exactly equivalent to Americans panicking about Spanish" comparison is good. Thanks!
Your comment reminded of the youtuber who changed the shop signs in his video into scary non-English script: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPZxMVpnCBM
Edit: Changed to link I like a bit more
Yes! This is partly why I brought it up. I remember that video from Kurt Caz.
There are shops elsewhere in Europe with Arabic signs. You can go there and buy things. They're not outside of the ordinary statistical distribution of shops.
Certain people would rather fearmonger though.
No. I think it's easy to underestimate what an incredible superpower native English fluency is, and the lengths that immigrants will go to ensure that their children are fluent in it. That alone stops monolingual enclaves persisting.
The net (and the UK has decades of experience in this, eg with the South Asian immigrants that arrived in the 1950s-1970s) is that while the first generation may only get to decent levels of English, their children are bilingual or monolingual in English, not monolingual in their ancestral tongue.
Occasionally you will get someone with a political axe to grind who visits an area with a lot of immigrants, doesnt hear a lot of English, and posits that there are ethnic monolingual enclaves where they cannot go. I think this is more likely to be a failure of understanding.
I have done a lot of social work with Bangladeshi community. What many people don't know that the Bangladeshi wives who come as dependants speak better English than their husbands and sometimes as good as the natives.
I was surprised the first time I got into volunteer work. Figured that these wives have never spoken English in their home country. So when they moved to London, they learnt English from scratch and picked up the local accent and speaking style. Their grammar may not be perfect sometimes but whose is?
Not sure what point you’re trying to make here in relation to startups.
I am not making any points. I have just heard this take a lot of times and I have not been around London for over 10 years. If there is a point, it is not mine.
As for its relevance: "native speakers on English", etc.
Yes, as I have said, over 10 years.
I do not use Twitter nor Facebook. I watch YouTube videos. These YouTubers have >1M subscribers.
I don't know what >1M subscribers have got to do anything. It is the case that many YouTubers pushing a specific propaganda have >1M subscribers. YouTube may be a little better than Twitter or Facebook but if you land upon any propaganda, the algorithm will loop you in and keep supplying more and more propaganda videos. 1M subscribers or 1000 subscribers doesn't matter once you are stuck in the loop.
I see you have not been around in London for over 10 years. How was it back when you were in London? I've been in London for 10 years, so I probably came when you left. Never once I have been in any part of London where English was not the lingua franca. Yes, people speak their native languages too among themselves but I haven't met anyone anywhere in my 10 years who couldn't speak English. I don't think this is any different from any other megacity of the world.
I am completely biased but I think London is one of the best places to live in the world, everything considered.
There's a guy on Instagram who spins a wheel for a random country and goes to eat that cuisine somewhere in London. There are maybe 1 or 2 places in the world you can do that. It's an incredible feat of human diversity to pack hundreds of global cuisines into a 10 mile radius.
Food only takes you so far. The housing stock is simply terrible. Extremely small, damp, badly insulated ... I lived in four boroughs, from poor Southwark to rich Richmond. Had a couple of friends sharing a luxury flat by the Emirates stadium, you could hear the neighbours two doors down.
It was alright in my twenties. Built a career, made a ton of money before the IR35 reform, but you sort of felt like everyone had an expiration date, was there to build a career and then move away. It's not that interesting outside of zone 1, it's the same high street full of Prêts/Nerro/Itsu (If you're lucky) or Paddy Power/Chicken shop/charity shop, and rows of small, drafty and moldy terraced houses.
I wouldn't live there, but Paris is infinitely more charming, and keep getting more pleasant as they remove the cars from the city. It's a place that feels lived in, that encourages and rewards you for wandering.
Oh and it's also the least spontaneous place I've lived in. All the food in the world, but you can't really just decide to try something, because everyone knows about the place, and they don't do bookings anyway, and everything is packed all the time, so there's an hour and a half queue to get in, after which you'll be granted a generous 35 minutes to eat before being softly nudged out by the waiter.
This is probably good enough for the anglosaxons or the nordics, but food is just a small part of what makes a good dining experience.
Yeah my biggest problem with London is how it seems to lack a real spontaneous street food culture, especially compared to New York, Paris, or Istanbul (which is particularly great at this.)
I spent a couple days walking 40+ km around the city and usually I just ended up eating at Istu or Greggs or one of those similar chains. The same thing in NYC or Paris gets you an infinitely better food experience.
It seems like a great city to be rich and have dinner reservations though.
> It's not that interesting outside of zone 1
Bizarre take. Zone 1 is the absolute worst part of London, full of tourists and unimaginative morons.
Paris is ruthlessly segregated by race and class, not what I'd call charming.
The crowd is perhaps due to the concentration of world class museums and historical sights. I know it's hip to play blasé and so much cooler than the mindless drones, but there's a reason people are flocking to zone 1 instead of Peckham Rye.
> Paris is ruthlessly segregated by race and class, not what I'd call charming.
As opposed to London, where you famously are as likely to see people of all walks of life and income comingle in a tesco in Dagenham as you are in Kensington.
Nice try but yes, there are council estates in Kensington & Chelsea just like everywhere else. Perhaps you've heard of Grenfell?
There are even middle class professionals in Barking & Dagenham - it's well covered by the new Elizabeth line.
I don't know London all that well, I've only spent about a month there. But in my limited experience the food scene didn't come close to LA, SF, NYC, Tokyo.
As an example, the LA metro Area (LA, OC, SB), 46% latino, 27% white, 15% asian 7% african, 3% mixed
There huge sections of those cities, several kilometers long where you drive for miles and see majority one culture. Several areas majority korean, chinese, japanese, vietnamese, middle eastern, african,
The great thing about London is that it has diversity without segregation. So no, you won’t find a huge area of town where almost everyone is of the same ethnicity, but the diversity is still there. Race isn’t the only index. A higher percentage of London’s population is foreign-born than LA’s.
Food depends a lot on what you go for. You won’t find much good Mexican food in London, but on the other hand, you can by a better croissant in a supermarket here than you can find in most of the US.
My experience is that until you get the concentrated areas you don't get the actual diversity of the foods. When you have large areas of the same culture you start to get regional restaurants from the culture, specialty restaurants from the calture, because the market is big enough and business needs to distinguish themselves. You also get the ingredients as there's a big enough market to import them. When you don't have the concentration you just get the generic representation of the food from that country.
I have the opposite feeling. I would put London and NYC on roughly the same level, but London definitely beats SF and LA in terms of variety, quantity, and quality for a lot of cuisines. Tokyo is also not as good, but it’s different because you can find high quality (higher than basically anywhere in the world), but low variety.
I disagree, NYC was OK but LA and SF specifically, the average quality of food was pretty bad. There were absolutely good options, plenty of them, but on average, just walking around, seeing something that looks good and checking Google Maps reviews (including reading them), had 0 guarantee of the food being of any quality.
Compared to London and Paris where you're guaranteed a good meal in any random place as long as the google reviews are ~3.5+. And even for the lower, the complaints are usually that the service is slow or rude, not that the food is shit tier quality. I mean 4.9 noted places with ramen that tastes like margarine and uses canned vegetables, or where the meat tastes bad.
Nonsense. I sat down with 3 plates of legit Japanese BBQ + rice and soup today for £18. Right behind Oxford Circus.
Wow, my experience is so different. The two most disappointing places I’ve ever been food wise were London and Paris. Spent 2 months in Paris, nothing stuck out except for one home cooked meal at a friend’s
as Tyler Cowen says, Tokyo has the best food in the world, and the best French food in the world.
https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/david-brooks-2/
Tokyo has even won best pizza as judged by the Italian pizza competition in Italy several years
Paris has almost no East Asian food and what I did see when trying to find some was all in porcelain trays like slightly fancier Panda Express.
London I found a few good places in Soho but just slightly out of the center it was a food desert
> Paris has almost no East Asian food and what I did see when trying to find some was all in porcelain trays like slightly fancier Panda Express.
This is simply not true. Are you sure you were in Paris, France? French people absolutely adore East Asian, and especially Japanese cuisine. There are the meh fast food options, yes, but the majority are definitely sushi places. And you have tons of others like Korean, Korean barbecue, more traditional japanese, etc.
The Japanese restaurants are concentrated around rue St Anne; the Chinese ones around rue Volta. But not exclusively.
As a fun exercise, Japanese is the highest represented origin (country) category in the Michelin guide. After that is Italian with slightly less. (The first category is "modern" which can mean anything).
Back when I ran the Shenzhen Gastronomic Society I did most of the alphabet in Bangkok one trip, beginning with Afghan. I'd wager it's better food than London on average, purely based on freshness and tropical inputs. I think if you were to pick the best city on earth for food it would have to have resident international populations, a tropical climate, and at least enclaves of wealth with a relatively free visa policy. Bangkok fits the bill. For variety I much prefer it to Singapore, KL, HK, Jakarta, Taipei, etc. Best for drinks has to be HCMC. Paris and New York are up there too, but you have to be 0.1% to enjoy them exhaustively. I spent 10 years designing food robots mostly because so much damn awesome food is ~unavailable outside its origin. Now raising for GTM/growth: https://infinite-food.com
Bangkok has the best food of anywhere I’ve been. The country is obsessed with food in general, while not being snobby about it. It is an absolute highlight of expat life there. The bar/cocktail scene can also hold its own against literally anywhere.
While you can often get bad versions of things if you go out of your way, many foods are hamstrung by supply chain, which is to say without a critical mass the labor intensive elements do not make sense or the specific crops are unavailable. Ask any migrant (eg. your next Uber driver) which foods they miss from their hometown or childhood and whether locally available versions are up to par. You'd be surprised at the details that emerge.
True. Generally whatever niche interest people have, they usually can find it in London. As a fellow passenger old lady once put it on the tube: "London might not be the prettiest but certainly the most interesting city".
Though personally I find it pretty enough.
Where else have you lived though? The cost of living is high, healthcare is problematic, crowded, bad weather, low economic growth prospects.
It's not even top 10 on most lists. Europe, Australia has way better cities.
Example Sydney, life expectancy is at least 5 years more.
The poverty rate in London, 26%, is double of Sydney at 13%.
E.g. https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurabegleybloom/2025/06/18/the...
You could not possibly compare Sydney and London, they are very different. London is a bustling diverse city, Sydney is a nice (big) town. Sydney is a great place, and London is far from perfect but they are not in the same conversation. They are different.
The Global Liveability Index is, essentially, highlighting the most middle of the road cities. London (as with New York) has huge disparities and that guarantees it will never rank well on the Global Liveability Index. The people who choose to live in London and love London (as with the people who choose to live in New York and love New York) do not choose it because it is average.
I have lived in London and Sydney and many other cities. I have fallen out of love with London. I would rather live in Sydney than London. I still cannot imagine ever describing Sydney as a better city than London. Just as I can't imagine describing Copenhagen better than London.
Healthcare in London is world class. A city is crowded. The weather is very average for Europe.
People from Sydney who move to London come to hate it, once the novelty wears off, just as they would with New York, because the Australian way of life is very different. Sydney is closer to island life than city life.
Even with London's ongoing decline due to the U.K's inexplicable self sabotage, it still has something to offer.
> People from Sydney who move to London come to hate it, once the novelty wears off, just as they would with New York
Just sharing a different perspective, I'm from Sydney and have lived in all 3 and don't agree with this generalisation. I know plenty of Sydney-raised people who've lived in London or New York for decades, love those places, and don't plan to move back to Sydney any time soon if at all.
The best part about London weather is that it’s rarely life threatening. No big storms, cyclones, floods or extreme temperatures.
To say it’s pleasant year round is probably a bit of a stretch for most.
> London has a special microclimate and pleasant weather
It is hard to reconcile this with having actually lived there. The only benefit to the weather in London is it rarely gets very cold. Other than that, it gets very dark winters, it’s rarely sunny, when it gets too hot it’s unbearable because nowhere has aircon, and it’s usually drizzling.
The weather is appalling.
I'm fairly well travelled. Lived in Tokyo for a bit. There's no perfect city. London has the best combination of all attributes, for me.
Have you lived in London and Sydney both, or are you just reading numbers off of Google and "best city" lists? Sydney is boring and in the middle of nowhere.
I'm from Sydney and yes lived in London, Melb, Auckland and Hong Kong. My main recollection of London was narrow streets. I think we like being in the middle of nowhere (geography, nuke missile target, conflict), surrounded by ocean. It is true, it's the one downside, it takes a long time to fly anywhere else.
Fair enough. I think if you like to travel, go away for the weekend etc then Sydney is not on the list. London has cheap euro flights, hub airports etc. I'm sure the QOL is good in all of those places of course, nice place to raise a family etc.
You can certainly do that in Houston. Food from anywhere is something we have more of than most American cities, and you don’t have to wonder if you’ll be able to get a table in the restaurant tonight. But if you like living in densely populated London, you might not prefer how spread out Houston is. I do love visiting London to experience a totally different world from my usual daily life.
No, you can't do it in Paris or Berlin. I don't know enough about LA and SF but, like Berlin, they're much smaller than London. Berlin is 1/2 the pop of London.
For example, there are 4 Uyghur restaurants just on my cycle to work. According to Google, Paris has 1 and Berlin has 0.
Only NYC can compare for population, density and diversity.
There is only so much of food one can eat and after all potatoes and steak do the job as well.
It's okay not to be that into food, but a bit odd to expect everyone else to be the same. If I had to eat steak and potatoes every day I'd be miserable by day 2.
Conversely it's true for the parent comment. Being able to eat food from any country is a plus only to those who are into that hobby. Personally it ranks pretty low in my list of things that make a city a great city. And if we're talking about food, access to fresh, high quality and affordable produce is way more important than being able to eat Afghan food at 3am. These criteria are arbitrary and don't make a city better than another imho.
Completely agree. "All food of the world at 3am" wears out pretty quickly. Much higher priority for me is access to fresh fruit, vegetables, fish, and meat at a good price.
And there are a few places globally that have that vibe
Hub / City Area,Total Tech Startups,Total Funding (2025 Est.),Total Residents (Metro),Startups per 1k Residents,Money per 1k Residents
San Francisco (Bay Area),"18,052",$122.0 Billion,7.7 Million,2.34,$15.84 Million
New York City,"15,000+",$45.0 Billion,19.5 Million,0.77,$2.31 Million
London,"8,900",$26.0 Billion,9.0 Million,0.99,$2.89 Million
Tel Aviv (Area),"2,996",$12.0 Billion,4.2 Million,0.71,$2.86 Million
Beijing,"2,350",$18.0 Billion,21.9 Million,0.11,$0.82 Million
Paris,"3,200",$10.0 Billion,13.1 Million,0.24,$0.76 Million
Bangalore,"3,500",$12.0 Billion,14.0 Million,0.25,$0.86 Million
Yup, London has consistently showing up in geographic hotspots in my job postings data. I think it could be also be due to success of companies like DeepMind.
https://jobswithgpt.com/blog/global_software-engineering_job...
At least Elon Musk didn’t end up getting it, which he tried before Google swooped in.
A different perspective: https://x.com/aakashgupta/status/2016375397131420005
TL;DR: What London actually built is Europe’s most efficient farm system for US acquirers. The city does the expensive, risky work of finding founders, funding early rounds, and proving product-market fit. American companies wait until the risk is de-risked, then buy the winners at discounts enabled by London’s shrinking public markets.
This.
Also UK contract law is well established and it's easy to find experienced transatlantic lawyers and firms (there's a reason UK lawyers can practice in NY and why both Hong Kong and the Emirate of Dubai kept poaching British judges with contract dispute into their business judiciary).
In most cases when we'd invest in a startup abroad, the founder would often structure their startup as a subsidiary of a US, UK, Singapore (especially Indian/Chinese startups), or Cayman Islands (it's a BOT so you basically get it for free) corporation.
Ironically, this ease of financial access is what makes it difficult to seed a lasting DeepTech startup in the UK because capital would often be deployed to invest in other startup ecosystems. I wrote about this before on HN as well [0][1][2]
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42768018
London and UK for that matter is great and seeding Startups...high quality universities, entrepreneurialism and attractive tax benefits for angels but for real growth capital it lags massively behind US and has forever.
The Kraken story is one to follow to see if this changes...https://www.british-business-bank.co.uk/news-and-events/news...
"Freetrade built a profitable trading app, got acquired by IG Group for £160M after targeting a £700M valuation"
That is not an accurate recollection of history. Freetrade raised money at a £700 million valuation at the very top of the market when money was plentiful, then, when the money dried up, and they were forced to go from losing money to making money, and they cut all advertising, they were able to just about scrape profitability. At the point of the acquisition, Freetrade either needed more investment to fund more advertising, or get acquired. After 10 years, a dozen rounds of fundraising and capital drying up, £160M is a good exit. Freetrade was significantly overvalued at £700 million.
https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/investing/article-142962...
There's an argument that some of these takeovers should have been blocked.
It is - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-30/london-dr...
Edit: can't reply
The majority of IPOs in 2025 were in 4 markets - US, China, Hong Kong, India, and South Korea [0]. It's really hard to exit in the LSE currently, and this article is self congratulatory while ignoring major recent (past 2-3 years) mistakes that negatively impacted the entrepreneurship scene in the UK (eg. the revocation of funding for Tech Nation [1] and the ongoing leadership crisis at Monzo [2] which makes no one look good).
[0] - https://www.ey.com/en_pt/insights/ipo/trends
[1] - https://sifted.eu/articles/tech-nation-shutting-down
[2] - https://www.ft.com/content/3405c6f3-931b-4fe3-a169-a9665a132...
No it isn't, London's IPOs in 2025 were mostly towards the end of the year, after that article was written. London ended up about 8th worldwide for issuances in 2025 - https://www.pwc.co.uk/press-room/press-releases/research-com...
Plus, the FTSE 100 returned 25.8% last year. That is not a shrinking market!
EDIT: I'd prefer you not change the subject away from your capital markets claim, but to address the other links:
1. I didn't say London was a top 4 IPO location, just that it's market aren't shrinking.
2. Tech Nation still exists, and still administers that visa. I don't know why you posted a very out of date article about it.
3. It's not ideal that such a high profile company is having issues like that, but hey, stuff happens. OpenAI had a whole goddamn coup and counter-coup happen!
> Plus, the FTSE 100 returned 25.8% last year. That is not a shrinking market!
After a long period in the doldrums.
I don't know Aakash Gupta so I can't say if he's lying or just didn't do his research, but I know the IPO figures he cited there are wrong, like very wrong, which puts everything else there in doubt.
Not to mention location of IPO not being all that important. But that's a whole separate thing.
Surprised London holds this position given the cost of living. Housing alone eats such a massive chunk of salary that I'd expect talent to gravitate toward cities where their equity/salary goes further. How do early-stage startups compete for engineers when rent is £2k+ for a one-bedroom?
>> Surprised London holds this position given the cost of living. Housing alone eats such a massive chunk of salary that I'd expect talent to gravitate toward cities where their equity/salary goes further. How do early-stage startups compete for engineers when rent is £2k+ for a one-bedroom?
thinking about comparisons, in SF the average 1B is $3300 https://www.zillow.com/rental-manager/market-trends/san-fran...
In NYC it is similar.
SF's challenge is that the business distract is split across 2 areas (SF, SV) 50mi apart, with extremely sparse public transit in SV. Everything is doable, just be prepared for $100 Uber bills as you go between meetings.
In NY the business district is thankfully mostly centralized. However, poor commuter train service outside of Manhattan makes everything more expensive as there is insatiable appetite in central areas to avoid the commuter trains.
Yeah, I've lived in London, New York and San Francisco for work and the first had the lowest cost of living in absolute terms. Local developer salaries are, however, shockingly low outside of finance and consulting to US eyes.
The public transportation point is definitely key: London is just so unspeakably large spatially and it's all more or less well-connected that there isn't the same scarcity of commutable apartments as in NYC/SF. It wasn't uncommon for older colleagues to even commute in from Kent or elsewhere in the English countryside -- and often their morning train wasn't much longer than my own.
The issue is that wages in London are much lower for tech than in SF or NY. If you want to make good money in London, you have to work in finance, and preferably in the investment business.
London is a very expensive city, and the median income is actually very low compared to it. There is a high concentration of people who are very well off, but everyone else is struggling.
Plenty of stuff much much cheaper than that outside of the center. Quick look in Deptford shows a bunch of 1 bedrooms for £850/m
Perhaps this is a feature not a bug.
High rents encourages startups to be founded by those who haven't coupled up and who choose to live together.
A company of 3 single founders in their mid twenties that rent a two bed flat and then live and breath nothing but their startup collapsing on the couch each night can make two $50k angel cheques go a long way.
Edit: SEIS allows a friends and family seed round if up to £250k in London that the government will rebate 78% of in taxes (50% immediately and 28% if the company eventually goes bust).
Most live in flat-shares, which honestly I prefer to living alone anyway. You can easily find central London flat shares for £1000 a month which are walking distance to various central locations, and extremely quick by bus/bike/tube.
I've lived in London for 8 years now as a student (undergaduate masters then PhD) and have lived on around £20k a year (post tax) and it's completely fine tbh. I earn more through extra work but save pretty much all of it.
I mean, by comparison to the booming US market, paying for London talent is becoming an absolute bargain...
There's a lot of problems with bureaucracy there (I've lived in London and Lisbon). It's a great city but the government is insanely inefficient (compared to the UK IME).
Long term visa waits are 2 years+. In a personal example, Portugal was the last country _by far_ in the EU to be able to issue residency cards for UK people after Brexit (despite having a very sizeable british population). This caused a lot of practical problems, as it stuck everyone in a massive limbo - other EU countries wouldn't accept that you were a portugese resident with the piece of paper they gave you. It took intense lobbying by the British embassy and European Commission to get the system in place at all.
In a commercial sense there are other problems. The court system is completely non functional. A simple civil case can take _years_ just to get a hearing. With appeals etc you can easily look at a decade. Again, there's a lot of problems in the UK with courts, but it is on a different scale there. This causes a lot of problems because businesses can get away with various shady stuff knowing it is basically impossible to enforce contractual terms - everything from landlords to b2b has issues.
It's got an enormous amount of promise but until the immigration/court system improves it is very hard to do business there.
The CEO of cloudflare has posted about this kind of stuff on Twitter (Cloudflare is a huge employer there) occassionaly. It's not positive to say the least.
I wonder who are these people willing to work in London and transfer 60% of their net income directly to landlord. Maybe money doesn't matter because most of the time they spend in work and commuting?
There goes another 15% of your net income on train tickets. Eating out every time (because have no time for proper value shopping) and you are basically working in exchange of food, housing, and commute.
Where are you pulling this random 15% number from? And a ridiculous number too. It's more like 2% to 3% unless you spend your entire day traveling.
I just checked how much I pay for travel. My monthly travel expenses is £150 total. That's like between 2% to 3% of someone's net income (depends on how much net income you make).
Do you know it is impossible to 15% of your net income in travel because there is a weekly fare cap: https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/find-fares/capping
Worst case scenario, you are traveling too much every week to max out the fare cap across all travel zones. Your monthly total would be £244. That's like 3% to 6% of your net income. But this is the worst case scenario. If you are spending 6% of your net income on travel, maybe you should reconsider which zone you live in.
So seriously where are you pulling out this ridiculous 15% number from?
Extrapolated from past earnings, but yeah if rent takes 60% of net salary then monthly train will more in the 5-10% range of net salary.
As long as you live within Greater London and can use TFL, it's more like 5%
In other European "tech hubs" you're not going to find a job or will not be able to rent anything.
Funny how San Francisco can't fit the chart they have. League of its own I guess.
Is the juice worth the squeeze?
Then you'd feel like it's not you/your idea/your company but the ecosytem at large
I cant speak to all this, but as an American doing a lot of work in London, wow transportation is incredibly great. Shockingly impressive. Traveling to London, and getting around London, and doing a lot of meetings in a small trip, is easier than anywhere in the US now because of how beautifully their transit system works (despite occasional delays which can be expected.)
The rollout of the Elizabeth Line from Heathrow airport is also eye-opening. In NYC we speak about new subways lines with hundred-year plans (recall the 2nd ave subway extension) but in London the smoothly operating Elizabeth Line seemed to be introduced out of thin air.