May 4, 2016
London firmly established as global leader in tech and media start ups 0
One new tech company has started every hour in London since 2012, which has firmly established the Capital as the global leader in tech and media start ups. According to property firm JLL, over the last five years, a massive 45,000 new tech businesses has been set up in London, with 98 percent of tech companies being start-ups and small businesses. There is migration from the West End to the City and the East, including ‘Silicon Roundabout’ in Old Street, but also new areas which are attracting technology and media companies. The growth of small business has also seen the average office footprint of T&M business fall over the last three years. JLL says for every one T&M company that moved out of Aldgate, Clerkenwell and Shoreditch over the last three years, two new tech and media companies moved in indicating the rapid consolidation of T&M business in the East.
May 5, 2016
The problems that come with London’s success need better solutions 0
by Mark Eltringham • Architecture, Cities, Comment
We might all welcome London’s success as a thriving centre of commerce and culture, but this comes at a price and we need to look for a better balance than we currently see between London and the rest of the UK. Of course London is often the main victim of its own success. Its thriving tech and creative firms continue to spill out of the incubator districts created for them to find cheaper and more appropriate spaces in which to grow. In doing so they are pushing up rents in such unlikely nearby places as Croydon. In the traditional business districts in the City and Docklands, the capital’s tech giants are now able to compete for the first time for some of the most expensive real estate on the planet. To cope with demand, the Mayor is rubberstamping tall buildings like never before, many of them bloody awful, unloved by Londoners and heritage organisations alike, transforming the skyline and creating windswept, arid tundra at their feet.
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