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.
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.
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?
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.)
The Piccadilly Line was opened in 1906 for gods sake, forgive them for not catering to people with 3 suitcases very well! That's part of the reason we built the Elizabeth Line, to enable a better transport option for people coming into heathrow.
I'm not sure they'd of gotten the tube at all, unless perhaps to connect to a mainline station for a trip to the country? I still feel it more likely they'd of been driven, either by horse drawn or maybe even car (at least to the station) even in 1906.
Other way round is my understanding. Road based transport was for the poor, especially trams, and the underground was for the fancy folk looking to shortcut past all of that.
I remember some rather old photos with very well-dressed people waiting for the tube... so probably "it depends". Compared to horse-drawn carriages, the tube was fast and not prone to traffic jams.
Most people of that era were "very well-dressed" relative to their wealth compared to today's "pyjamas and slippers to go to the local shop" level of couture, so I'm not to sure how much you can read into that.
But total wealth was a lot lower than today, while clothes were much more expensive relative to the average income than today. Many people wore their best clothes on Sundays only, and street photos from the same period show that an average person was dressed rather simply.
I don't even think that the tube was affordable to average working class public. When I read historic accounts from much later (the 1930s), they mention that fare on public transport was expensive enough that you had to choose between a breakfast and a ride.
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've lived in and visted many other cities in Europe. Public transport is often much cheaper than London, but there's few examples where I'd really say it was /better/. Can you think of an example?
Oslo and Madrid come to mind. For the worst than london, The Rome underground is so sparse, it not really usefull. Paris is dense, chaotic and overcrowded.
Every single time I've been in Madrid the metro has been on strike. Every time. They run about 50-60% of services which means everything is slow and packed. I would actually say it's one of the worst in europe in my (I guess limited) experience due to that. I will have to try Oslo!
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.
True, but it's not london public transport (e.g not TFL) and that may actually be the only reason it's bad. Look what happened when TFL took over national rail services inside london (silverlink > overground).
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.
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.
You're describing economies of scale — they inevitably happen. London has high returns not only because of investment but also because it's a huge city and big cities generate good returns. If you built the Elizabeth line in the middle of nowhere, you wouldn't get a return. The return is enabled by the fact it's a big city.
Elizabeth line will pay for itself very very quickly. It's entirely possible that investment in say a tram network in the east midlands will never pay for itself. Left with business cases like that it's not really a shock what the goverment choses. I agree it's unfair and self fulfilling, but this is what life is like, success breeds success and failure, well.
I think north of 62% of elizibeth line spending was spent with companies outside the M25, for example building the trains kept a chunk of Derby in work when the factory would have otherwise closed (more than once!) https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cew407745jko
> This is demonstrably false. The data shows the exact opposite.
it is not
> Yes, London generates a fiscal surplus
thank you
the only regions of the UK that generate a net return to the treasury are London, the South East and East of England
(the East of England certainly has reasons to be upset, they have naff all infrastructure AND are a net payer)
> You can't starve regions of infrastructure for decades, watch their productivity stagnate, then point to London's tax surplus as proof the system works, that's fucking stupid.
London's surplus exists because the entire country funded its infrastructure for decades. You've just admitted London got massively more investment - then you point at the returns from that investment as proof London subsidises everyone else. That's absurd.
Where did the £140 billion extra that London received come from? National taxation. Including taxes from the regions that got a fraction of the spending. They funded your infrastructure, then you claim the resulting productivity is you being generous.
You're not subsidising the UK. You're taking credit for returns on investment the entire country paid for, but only London received. That's not generosity, that's just spending other people's money on yourself then acting smug about the results.
The 'net return to the treasury' you're celebrating was built with everyone's taxes concentrated in one place. London isn't the benefactor, it's the beneficiary masquerading as an altruistic donor.
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
Imagine if the money spent on transport in London wasn't funding things like fake jobs to carry people to massive pensions because TFL employees can't be made redundant.
> 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.
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
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.
It doesn't matter what most Americans want, because most urban land is zoned in such a way that single-family houses are all that is legal to build. The extremely high prices of housing units in central urban areas suggest that demand for dense cities, public transit, and shared spaces greatly exceeds the artificially-restricted supply.
Here in Seattle, you can basically see the zoning boundaries as you drive around the city, because development always goes right up to the edge, as hard as it can. Without the arbitrary limits imposed by the zoning code, there would be a whole lot more condos built (and lived in!), and those edges would be a lot softer, shaped by ebbs and flows of market demand rather than the sharp lines of law.
Genuinely dense cities basically don't exist in the U.S. The average "dense" city downtown in a U.S. city is broadly comparable to the worst car-dependent suburban or exurbian hellscapes of Europe and East Asia, and things only go worse from there. City downtowns near the East Coast are an exception since they were built in colonial times or thereabouts, so when you think "dense" you should really think of e.g. the densest boroughs in NYC.
Yes and that reflects historical and cultural factors. Cities in Europe were largely built in the preindustrial era. In the U.S. there is just so much more space; it does not make sense to build small or dense. Transportation habits just reflect this.
You make it sound like the construction of US cities were not at all lobbied by the auto industry back in the day and that urban sprawl was exclusively people's choice.
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.
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.
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.
How dare you get in the way of my fat ass in my fat-ass SUV. Almost spill my capuccino that I bought at the drive-thru because I couldn't get my fat ass off the car.
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.
Trains are not an efficient use of time for travel within the US.
The US is huge. If you were take a 300mph (nearing 500kph) train (which would make it the fastest train in the world), it would be OVER an 8 hour trip from New York to LA. (Again, about 2500 miles or 4000k)
Even in some of the densest areas, the trip times end up being pretty long due to distances: dc to New York? 600 kilometers or almost 400 miles.
People aren't taking trains from Madrid to Tallinn, either.
The proper point of comparison here is more medium length trips. There's no reason not to have a high speed train for Portland - Seattle - Vancouver, for example.
This is irrelevant, though, since the size of the country isn’t what determines where people go. It’s not like trains got less practical when Alaska got admitted to the union.
Sprawling, low density, single use zoning, combined with parking minimums, have much more to do with it.
The question was what the train network is like outside the cities. And the answer is we don’t use trains because it is not efficient for the scale of the country. This is correct.
Most people ARE interested in coast to coast travel. It is called flyover country for a reason.
There are a few exceptions like the Baltimore corridor, or the San Francisco peninsula, and these are in fact serviced by good trains.
Train travel from LA to NY wouldn't be efficient, but there are plenty of population poles like LA to SF where train travel would make sense and a network of those could make cross country travel feasible if not in a hurry. But as the GP pointed out, it is not that useful if you can arrive to LA by train, if then when you arrive you need to rent a car before you've even left the station.
It is always shocking to me when I land at an airport in the US and there no public transport available.
It is common for conversations about good local public transport to have a retort in some sub-thread about how big the US is, as if the feasibility of long distance travel affected the feasibility of other modes of local travel.
You mention the SF peninsula. When I first moved there, I lived in the westside of SF and had friends living in Sunnyvale. On a weekend, it took 4 hs to get to Mountain View (~40miles, at the time, checking now it seems like Caltrain weekend service might have improved, so the same trip would take about 2hs), and then had to be picked up by car to finish the rest of the trip. It was faster (~3:30hs, if more expensive) to go from Paris to Amsterdam (>300miles) by train.
How long would it take from New York to Philadelphia, or Boston to DC? How long would it take between San Diego and SF? What about a train between Chicago and Detroit?
We're building a fast train from Toronto to Quebec city in Canada. It's going to be a lot more comfortable and way faster than driving. A MP in my family takes the train from Montreal to Ottawa very frequently, they don't want to bother with parking in the capital and they can work on the train.
NY to Philadelphia is relatively fast. There was a faster train on that route even before Acela (Metroliner). Boston to DC is a fairly long day by train and, while I've done it, no business person who is really on a schedule is going to vs. taking a pretty short flight. (And, if you're really going city to city, both cities have close-in airport options.)
I 100% agree trains might be underfunded in the US. The LA to NY flight will stay preferred to a hypothetical high speed train due to time. It is unlikely ever to be less than 10 hours.
For train rides under 4 hours, and if you can get trains running smoothly (less stops), the time spent on the train and the overall integration of trains is a lot better as a mode of transportation.
I see your point, but consider this: getting to and through a major airport is a huge pain the ass. Trains also tend to take you to city centers more often than airports, which almost always need to be a significant distance from anything interesting due to the noise.
Let's take a hypothetical scenario:
- 5 hours flight time (average for NY and LA), 2 hours on each side to get to and from the airport to the actual city. Total is 9 hours.
- 10 hours train time and 1 hour on each end (which is generous given the proximity of train stations to city centers), 12 hours.
The difference is not that much, and a train ride is so much less faff than a flight that it's not even funny. Little to no security theater, you don't get fondled by security agents, you don't have to stand hours in line with silly passport controls and luggage checkins/pickups. And the list goes on.
A good train infrastructure can be vastly more pleasant than a good air infrastructure. Where air wins out is intercontinental flights where trains are truly not an option anymore.
Eh, you're overselling it. Even in a hypothetical world with a 12 hour train trip, it still loses to an 8 hour plane trip.
You're losing an entire day on the train. You still have to deal with luggage pains, now you're eating on the transportation which will be inferior, and will have similar problems with last mile transportation.
Flying is currently not a great 8 hour experience, but it beats losing an entire day. I can do LA to NY for a weekend trip. (I personally wouldn't but there are some that would for sure)
Trains can and do make sense even in the US, and we do ourselves great harm by underinvesting in them, but there will always be a place for plane travel.
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.
The suburban rail in Boston is very much commuter rail. I live about 50 miles west (pretty near a station though I have to drive) and I'll absolutely take it for a 9-5ish urban event. But it's completely useless for anything in the evening.
Different cities. Different transport situations. I'm not convinced I would take commuter rail in and out of where I live to Boston even if it ran more frequently. Chicken and egg and all that but it's empty in the evening as it is.
Even the reverse commute in the evening is annoying but then it's quite straightforward to go home. There are usually reasonable parking options. Personally, not sure I'd use it outside of rush-hour in and back.
Its good in NYC for american standards. For european standards the NYC subway is abominable. The smells, the grime, the homeless, its honestly like visiting the 6th ring of hell. Source: I am a european living in NYC.
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.
Hah, the joys of optimising your morning commute on the Underground.
“If I stand here on the platform, then the door will open right in front of me, and I’ll be exactly at the exit of the next platform where I need to change…”
Yeah or “the signs all say to walk down this long passage, and then back via a circuitous route for flow control, but my destination is actually 100 feet away through this unmarked passage so I’ll just go that way” situation at Bank
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[...].
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 friend of mine used:
A company that just started that can scale to 100M evaluation in less than 5 years.
From these point of views, there are a lot of wonderful SMEs that need to see the ligth. They should be supported by the government and the community, but they need very different tools from what we define as startups.
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.
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?
You say this as if venture capital is lying there on the ground for anyone to pick up. What VC do you know that aren't investing in companies that want to grow very quickly (or in companies that they then force to grow quickly)?
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.
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 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.
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
Startups might thrive there, but business investment in England (particularly in mature businesses) has not exactly been lively ever since Brexit. I can't recall the last time I heard someone talking favorably about investing in England, or at all, really.
> 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.
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.
I was going to reply to grandparent that only flat prices are coming down because of rising service charge costs, and being hard to mortgage because of cladding issues.
But after some research it is indeed true that house prices are, to a lesser extent, also going down, at least in real terms, if not nominal.
In multiple UK regions, but the most expensive ones and London the most.
Its coming down but from a very high level in London.
I do not know about other countries, but movements do tend to be wide spread (at least across similar economies). We are seeing higher interest rates in a lot of countries and they are the main determinant of the multiple of income properties sell at.
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 was going to add "coming into a pub in Wales and complaining about the occupants switching to Welsh", but that is a slightly different scenario. Partly because Welsh is much rarer.
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.
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.
I don't think so. Like sure, if you're a Bangladeshi living in Tower Hamlets you could probably get away with a limited life speaking only Bengali, but you could say the same about Spanish in swathes of the US. Realistically, you need English.
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?
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.
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.
40+km, every day? Or even if total, it's a proper distance.
I'm fascinated by that. Do you just walk around randomly or do you plan things you want to see ?
Walking is imo one of the big "secret" ways to get to know a city. I fondly recall just getting lost on purpose in major cities, and at the end of the day take a taxi, or bus, or tuk-tuk back to the place I was staying. So many things seen, and tried, and random people encountered from all walks of life, it's one of the best things.
Yeah I was doing a challenge of walking entirely across the city, from Woolwich to Heathrow. I think I made it to about Chiswick before my phone died and it was too dark to keep recording on my GoPro. So maybe 30-35k or so that day, and another 20k or so the day before and after just exploring the city more informally.
Agreed that walking is the best way to see a city, for sure. I have done similar one day walks across Brooklyn, Manhattan, etc. and always really enjoy the experience. Usually I have a kind of set goal, like “walk entirely across X place.” I think in Istanbul though I mostly just wandered for 100km (over the course of a week.)
This past summer I walked about 124km around Paris over 5-6 days, going in a spiral through all the arrondissements. That was a great way to discover some new neighborhoods.
I completely agree, it's fantastic both for general fitness, and as a way of exploring. I do this on a smaller scale on a daily basis, walking the 8-10 km route to or from my work (when we have office days). This is walkable in about 1.5 hours, public transport would get me home in around 45 minutes, so I am not really investing much extra time. Varying the route slightly keeps things interesting, and you get a surprising variety with small (1 to 2 street) changes.
Another favourite of mine is cycling around a neighbourhood to get to know it; you get a totally different feel for things than from a car - things typically go by slower, and you are somehow just far more able to observe things.
But are the places you’re eating 1) fairly affordable and 2) quick / fast food and not a proper sit down restaurant?
I had an extremely difficult time finding places with those requirements. Everything seemed to require sitting down for at least 20-30 minutes, which didn’t fit my walking schedule.
I didn’t have the same problem in NYC or Paris, where it’s very easy to find a variety of places to grab a kebab, baguette sandwich, pizza slice, dumplings, etc.
Yeah definitely affordable and quick. And can get all of those in London with zero effort. Most of the time I just search for food on Google Maps and pick something which doesn't look poisonous.
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.
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,
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.
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.
LA is much less dense than London so maybe you need concentration for those things, but we don't. We don't really have monocultural ghettoes. The beauty of London is how dense and intermixed it is. Cheek by jowl, as Shakespeare wrote.
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.
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.
> 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).
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".
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.
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.
> 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.
Yes I really wish people saying "X is the best place to live in the world" would add where else they have lived, otherwise their opinion is not very useful to me.
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.
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.
This is incredibly true even of things you wouldn't expect - Mexican food in Southern California is just different than Ohio even if you cook it yourself - because the ingredients may be labelled the same, but they're not.
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.
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.
Yeah, lots of examples of that happening. Runna was the latest one I can remember. I won't be suprised at all if ElevenLabs is bought out by a big US player soon.
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
"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.
And also, IG Group is a British company, HQ'd in London, traded on the London Stock Exchange. "British stock trading company acquired by British stock trading company" is a pretty boring event.
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]
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).
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!
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.
As a tangent, I'm seeing Lisbon trying to make a lot of buzz, but it seemingly can't crack into the larger ecosystem. What's missing, considering that it should be able to benefit from its EU integration?
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.
It truly is. I've seen multiple pre-seed startups and founders burn significant amounts of personal capital in order to land an O-1A visa because of how much capital and mentorship is available here.
Working for London startups in the past, I've found they're much more polite, but much less honest and straightforward. There's a layer of britishness you have to get past sometimes to get to what people really want instead of directness.
As a Brit when I started doing deals in North America one of the things I picked up was that I had to be explicit about disagreement OR where a decision was not being made yet. In the UK during a negotiation a 'silence' is not equal to agreement or disagreement, it's a NO-OP. If I didn't do this then prospective customers/suppliers in the USA would believe that I'd agreed to their request when from my perspective I had merely noted that they'd asked for something. Has anyone else run into this?
The other one that's confusing is that "tabling" something means the complete opposite.
I would separate 'politeness' and 'indirectness' a bit. I generally agree about 'politeness', there are plenty social forms that Brits still follow. For example I found the language/manner of New York attorneys pretty 'aggressive' the first few times.
Indirectness, is definitely a thing - Brits speak to each other or signal disagreement in ways that's clear to another Brit, but maybe not others. The use of silence, but also some words that depending on tone can mean different things which I think is difficult for North American's to interpret.
best reasoning I've heard for this is that English is subtext heavy, like Japanese due to the history of the aristocracy. The populace were in thrall to their feudal lords and the aristocracy as serfs and servant classes for so long, that being indirect has been embedded into the language as a defense mechanism to not upset the pay masters. We get the subtext but people new to our culture might not.
I remember a technological mess being present at work and my team lead bringing out the classic:
> it's not ideal is it?
or the classic Jeeves and Wooster valet/aristocrat relationship with Jeeves giving it the:
> as you say sir
> very good sir
with both statements being flexible but often being delivered with the dripping subtext of "yeah that's complete bollocks".[0]
Obviously this doesn't apply to the real working classes but then those types are not the sort to gain a STEM education.
Oh jeez, I've literally just typed out a message on Teams to describe a situation where someone deployed breaking DB changes without the accompanied app changes as "a less-than-ideal scenario". Sometimes I forget I have to translate from British for the benefit of everyone else on the team (half in India, half in US, one German)
My stock joke is that one of these countries is a feudal warrior culture and former empire that's obsessed with tea and saving face, and the other is Japan.
Depends on the company, but typical junior salaries are £35-45k a year, mid level around £50-65k year and senior somewhere between £65-85k a year. Obviously you have FAANG who pay significantly more and finance firms, but they are not the majority, and I've hired or have friends being paid in these ranges who are extremely talented and from top unis.
Upper ranges for all levels accross the very highest paying employees are £100-400k when including bonuses usually. Usually these are quant/quant-dev jobs and FAANG.
I've always found levels.fyi to be a little pessimistic for the UK when compared with commercially-available benchmarking services.
I suspect it's because people on PAYE tend to think of their basic salary + bonus + income tax, but disregard NICS, pension, paid holidays, and other benefits. They end up reporting a total package that's 10-20% lower than it actually is.
I arrive in 2026. Decide to start a startup. By the year 2038, the state mandated reader of legal documents has finished reading out aloud to me and my co-founder. Now we find a VC. His documents need to be read to us both. But the Y2K38 problem strikes. He thinks we are in the year 1970. He needs to read us the "ancient company addendum". While he's reading he chokes and keels over, dead from the emissions from his Volkswagen. Our ARR may be zero, but what about our government grants? Also zero.
My friend. He starts in France in 2026. The government mandates that the retiree earnings to worker earnings ratio must be fixed by law to what it was in 2025: 130%. For every employee I hire, I must also pay a retiree 1.3 times his salary. He visits me via train in 2038. I ask him how his trip was. Turns out he actually got on Deutsche Bahn train back then in 2026. I just didn't know because he spent all his time on Twitter explaining why the US approach to startups won't work. He's lucky. Pretty short delay for DB train.
Reminds me of how often you hear Austrian Railways announcing that they apologize for the late running of a train "which was subject to delays in a neighbouring land". They never name which country but it's always Germany.
The big disadvantage is wages, and how everything is so...formal and bureaucratic, for lack of better terms.
For example, I couldn't even hope to get employment in tech in the UK or Europe without a degree. Work hours and wages too, less pay given the tradeoffs makes sense, but getting paid more than others for the same role is a big problem, even if you have more skill/talent/experience. Or simply working long hours on salaried jobs, with the understanding that when the spring or whatever hacking cycle is over, you can take it easier, that's hard because of the formalities, laws,etc...
Perhaps the term I'm looking for is "inflexible"?
On the other hand, the reason all of that is not a problem here in the US is "bottom-line oriented" thinking, and that ultimately leads to everything getting enshittified.
It feels like the UK and EU think they're happy with where their society is at, and they mostly want to keep things afloat? The type of thinking that goes with startups involves risk taking and experimentation outside of zones of comfort, or even outright laws sometimes.
Would all these AI companies get away with scraping the internet if they were based in the UK or EU? I'm not saying they should, I'm saying look at the big picture results vs near-term stability and comforts.
If I were British or European, I would want local and/or regional wages to be high, trade surpluses to make sense, foreign dependency to be minimal, military to be strong, so that social welfare subsidies, and all the nice pro-human laws won't require so much sacrifice. The US had been (no longer) in that position, but our deep political divisions and prevalent sub-cultures of cruelty prevented us from going that extra step and having the best of both worlds for everyone.
Do you have an experience working in Europe or the UK?
> I couldn't even hope to get employment in tech in the UK or Europe without a degree
Maybe this is how it looks from the outside, but it's not how it works in reality.
My evidence is I've been working in 'tech' for 25 years and having hired people across the UK, Europe and North America. Tech is one of the most accessible career paths, particularly for areas that are novel and expanding rapidly - consequently direct experience of an area is the important currency.
Often roles will advertise a 'degree' or equivalent industry experience. The only roles I can think of where this could be an issue is trying to join a large corporate organisation in their 'graduate' programme (e.g. a major bank), but that's the same situation in the USA as well.
I have no experience working in the UK, my impression is entirely based on what people there have told me. I've also looked at job postings there. In the US you'll see "or equivalent experience" tacked on, but not in UK, Canada, EU job posts I've seen so far. But I'm very glad to hear you say it's different.
I've had a similar career, and the only time I've ever been asked about my education was towards the end of the hiring process with a major US-based tech company back in the early 2010s.
No UK employer has ever asked about it, to my knowledge.
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?
The math works out for almost every HCOL area. Your salary is higher. Rent is high too but people either choose to live further away or accept a smaller apartment/condo.
London has a big commuting radius with strong regional transit (as maligned as it is).
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).
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?
It should be based on the number of successes relative to the amount raised or ROI and that picture is quite different. In that sense London is way behind SV.
But it isn't true. For the rest of the world SV is still the place to go to, one way or another. The difference is just too big. What you could say is that London is the place to try to raise money if you can't raise in SV. But you'll have to realize that your chances of success are dramatically lower that way to the point that you're going to end up a with a small fraction of the stock yourself after the inevitable dilution through follow up rounds because you couldn't raise a large enough round to begin.
VC in London is harsh, both for the start-ups and for the VCs. What does happen is that a company manages to stay alive long enough to raise a secondary round in the USA, but then you can't really make the original claim in the TFA.
> But it isn't true. For the rest of the world SV is still the place to go to, one way or another.
We are using different meanings for the same phrase. SV is the best place to raise, IF YOU CAN AND ARE WILLING TO RAISE THERE. But not everyone can, nor does everyone want to. And of the locations that are not in the US, London dominates.
And hell, Americans raise in Boston, Seattle, NYC, and so on. Not even all Americans move to SV, let alone people who may not even get a visa to enter the US.
Eh, I know quite a few. LegalTech, hardware, obviously fintech, quite a bit of AI. But I work at a London startup so my social circle might be different to yours.
Having a London domicile often leads to an overstating in venture capital raised for the UK ecosystem.
For example, I've funded Polish and Indian startups that chose the UK as their legal domicile because we couldn't be bothered to hire a legal team to draft a contract to Polish or Indian specifications.
Builder.ai [0] is a great example of that - it was an Indian startup that was domiciled in London to simplify raising capital from Gulf investors.
Does this also impact US metrics for capital raised? My understanding is that the Delaware C-Corp is still the startup standard for founders from anywhere in the world to raise global capital, which I imagine skews where the capital actually ends up flowing if they are actually building a company in a foreign location and just using the Delaware entity as a holding co.
Somewhat, but not to the degree as you see in the UK, Singapore, or HK.
Until a couple years ago, it was difficult for someone without a SSN to create a Delaware C-Corp and even despite current political instability, the depth of IP, capital, and R&D available in the US is difficult to replicate outside China, Japan, and maybe India.
Startups like Builder AI use London because a.) they want to raise money from filthy rich Arab investors and b.) those guys are not known for doing much due diligence. They go more by vibes and hype and who's on the existing cap table. Also c.) they are very comfortable with London because it was so much easier back in the day to launder or siphon away funds from their home countries. London is an extremely popular destination for Gulf Arabs.
You'll get a lot of shady startups of that kind in London for this reason.
Not all Arab investors are bad - for example, funds associated with the Emirate of Abu Dhabi (eg. ADIA, Mubadala) has been extremely successful in their investments explicitly because Tahnoon studied engineering in San Diego (and rolled at Gracie's gym) back in the day.
Additonally, for every failed investment like builder.ai a fund like QIA and MS Ventures has had multiple other successful investments.
The perception of "shadiness" in the London VC scene arises simply because a subset of non-American VC simply does not care about value investing and product-led growth.
Additonally, it's not like the UK doesn't have good VCs and Growth Equity investors - for example Index Ventures and Ballie Guiffold both have a solid track record.
Being overly congratulatory and being overly pessimistic about the UK scene does more harm than good.
That would be pretty funny to say. Where are America's startups founded? Principally the San Francisco Bay Area. What about the Rest of the World? Oh, principally the San Francisco Bay Area.
It reminds me of the funny fact that for years I worked at a building in Bush St. that was nice but not particularly remarkable only to find out that that's where Saudi Aramco was originally headquartered when some Twitter post counted them for the Bay Area for their "Where are the top market capped public companies from?" segment.
Could you give only a few examples from those PLENTY of other places that are better? Like the first 10 that come to your mind, you made me very curious!
Which makes me all the more disappointed that Birmingham (close to me) doesn't have a better startup ecosystem.
It is an ideal place to benefit from London (little over an hour away) without the crazy prices.
Anyone here based around the midlands, say hello / "alright bab"....
London is the money laundering capital of Europe [1]. The entire London property market has been propped up by Russian kleptocrats [2]. I'm not saying startup money is (necessarily) illegal or at least dubious in origin. I am saying that London's banking and legal system heavily favors companies and invetors. And that's the point. It's the same reason Delaware is the de facto standard for incorporation for American companies.
Granted, English is widely spoken in London and that's factor for cross-pollination of talent between the US and the UK. It also has an easier visa situation than the US.
On top of that, salaries in tech in London are much lower than the US [3]. The cost of living in London is actually pretty awful.
London's biggest problem is that the UK is no longer in the EU. Long term I see this as a strategic problem because (IMHO) the EU is going to be incentivized and ultimately forced to make their own versions of key US tech companies in much the same way as China has. And the EU won't want that outside of EU jurisdiction. It defeats the point.
well, the split is both ways. lets not forget that depite a lot of talk and wish-casting, the EU is still largely impotent. I know for sure that I am envious of my colleagues in the US. but europe? hmm...
regarding the Russian kleptocrat situation, you can't knock London for having a Profitable Business Arrangement. The biggest enemy of any Russian oligarch are other Russian oligarchs. it makes sense then, to keep your dragon hoard where none of them can touch it (possibly not even you!)
ofcourse it becomes even funnier when all of them get the same idea, converging on the same optimal strategy...
indeed any and all mafiosos are welcome to safeguard their assets in London banks (for a price, and not neccesarily monetary.) whatever happened to the venezuelan gold? if that then serves to subsidize the rest of the UK ordinary citizenry, hey, you could say the UK in the business of karmic repayment.
1. Startups
2. Scaling/Growth
3. Existing company expanding from USA->Europe or Europe->USA
It's not as good as Silicon Valley for any of these, but no-where is. It's also not that good if you're trying to IPO, again no-where is compared to the USA.
For start-ups/high-growth you get a pretty good business environment (legal/corporate and day-to-day running a company is reasonably straightforward), employees with skills and the employment law is pretty flexible, there's plenty of finance around.
For Growth and USA companies that are expanding into Europe then London/UK is somewhat easier to understand than other European geo's. There's an aligned language and there's more cultural touchpoints - it's kind of a mid-point culturally/institutionally between Europe/USA.
For funding/driving to late-stage and IPO there just isn't anywhere like the USA. But everyone has to expand to North America eventually, so it can be fixed at that point. Also, PE funding has changed a lot in the last 10 years, so if you're not on the 1-in-1000 rocketships there's a more steady 'good' path which is totally viable.
This is generally how it is. For the entry level market you have a realistic choice of 5 companies like Barclays, BT, Amazon, SKY for limited positions while competing against the world for them. A fresh linkedin job post for tech even for no-name companies gets a 100+ applicants in under an hour starting at 30k salaries. I'm not even sure which startups are hiring graduates except maybe from Oxbridge. It is obvious a lot of people commenting particularly in this thread are ultra-privileged expats where "London" is just zone 1 for them and are well connected in the industry. They probably don't even know what Morley's is. Living costs along with the high tax rates alone will eat up your income and I know British people who work in international bank's at senior positions complaining about these things and about mass immigration all the time.
This doesn't seem true, I work in a UK tech company and it's an incredibly international team. My team has three Brits (including me), a Norwegian, a Swede, a Pole, and an American. The CEO is Irish, the CTO is German/American.
Obviously that's just one data point, but every tech company is similar.
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.
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.
I remember that one of Stockholm's train line is also endearingly tiny too?
Half the Berlin lines are weirdly narrow, but not short.
Budapest subway is something similar, too.
The oldest line which was inaugurated in the late 19th century, yes. (Though IIRC it is standard gauge.)
The three modern lines are spacious and high-capacity.
Very true. If you really want to see rail lines materialise out of thin air, go to any major cities in China.
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?
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.)
The Piccadilly Line was opened in 1906 for gods sake, forgive them for not catering to people with 3 suitcases very well! That's part of the reason we built the Elizabeth Line, to enable a better transport option for people coming into heathrow.
It is interesting how infrastructure silently reflects society of its time.
In 1906, people travelling with three suitcases would likely have servants carrying them, and no one cared particularly about comfort of servants.
I'm not sure they'd of gotten the tube at all, unless perhaps to connect to a mainline station for a trip to the country? I still feel it more likely they'd of been driven, either by horse drawn or maybe even car (at least to the station) even in 1906.
Other way round is my understanding. Road based transport was for the poor, especially trams, and the underground was for the fancy folk looking to shortcut past all of that.
I remember some rather old photos with very well-dressed people waiting for the tube... so probably "it depends". Compared to horse-drawn carriages, the tube was fast and not prone to traffic jams.
Most people of that era were "very well-dressed" relative to their wealth compared to today's "pyjamas and slippers to go to the local shop" level of couture, so I'm not to sure how much you can read into that.
relative to their wealth
But total wealth was a lot lower than today, while clothes were much more expensive relative to the average income than today. Many people wore their best clothes on Sundays only, and street photos from the same period show that an average person was dressed rather simply.
I don't even think that the tube was affordable to average working class public. When I read historic accounts from much later (the 1930s), they mention that fare on public transport was expensive enough that you had to choose between a breakfast and a ride.
> 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.
To americans, London public transport feels amazing. To rest of Europe, its lets say OKish
I've lived in and visted many other cities in Europe. Public transport is often much cheaper than London, but there's few examples where I'd really say it was /better/. Can you think of an example?
Oslo and Madrid come to mind. For the worst than london, The Rome underground is so sparse, it not really usefull. Paris is dense, chaotic and overcrowded.
Ok, Oslo would be a small city in the UK - London has 12x the population. Madrid is closer. Paris is great - the ride is very smooth.
Every single time I've been in Madrid the metro has been on strike. Every time. They run about 50-60% of services which means everything is slow and packed. I would actually say it's one of the worst in europe in my (I guess limited) experience due to that. I will have to try Oslo!
Anywhere in Germany? E.g. Frankfurt has much higher density of subway lines and trams.
Frankfurt is less than a tenth the size, I'm not sure it's really a comparison. I found Berlin to be no better/slightly worse.
Of course the transport is good in most DE cities but seriously, Frankfurt is a village compared to London. London's network is both vast and dense.
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.
True, but it's not london public transport (e.g not TFL) and that may actually be the only reason it's bad. Look what happened when TFL took over national rail services inside london (silverlink > overground).
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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
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...
You're describing economies of scale — they inevitably happen. London has high returns not only because of investment but also because it's a huge city and big cities generate good returns. If you built the Elizabeth line in the middle of nowhere, you wouldn't get a return. The return is enabled by the fact it's a big city.
Elizabeth line will pay for itself very very quickly. It's entirely possible that investment in say a tram network in the east midlands will never pay for itself. Left with business cases like that it's not really a shock what the goverment choses. I agree it's unfair and self fulfilling, but this is what life is like, success breeds success and failure, well.
I think north of 62% of elizibeth line spending was spent with companies outside the M25, for example building the trains kept a chunk of Derby in work when the factory would have otherwise closed (more than once!) https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cew407745jko
> This is demonstrably false. The data shows the exact opposite.
it is not
> Yes, London generates a fiscal surplus
thank you
the only regions of the UK that generate a net return to the treasury are London, the South East and East of England
(the East of England certainly has reasons to be upset, they have naff all infrastructure AND are a net payer)
> You can't starve regions of infrastructure for decades, watch their productivity stagnate, then point to London's tax surplus as proof the system works, that's fucking stupid.
fortunately I didn't claim that
please put the strawman down
You're confusing cause and effect.
London's surplus exists because the entire country funded its infrastructure for decades. You've just admitted London got massively more investment - then you point at the returns from that investment as proof London subsidises everyone else. That's absurd.
Where did the £140 billion extra that London received come from? National taxation. Including taxes from the regions that got a fraction of the spending. They funded your infrastructure, then you claim the resulting productivity is you being generous.
You're not subsidising the UK. You're taking credit for returns on investment the entire country paid for, but only London received. That's not generosity, that's just spending other people's money on yourself then acting smug about the results.
The 'net return to the treasury' you're celebrating was built with everyone's taxes concentrated in one place. London isn't the benefactor, it's the beneficiary masquerading as an altruistic donor.
> You're confusing cause and effect.
you are arguing against a point I never made
(and no, I don't live in London, I live in an underfunded region too)
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
London pays more taxes per capita than the rest of country.
And decisions made in London have drained those other cities of investment and tax revenue.
Imagine if the money spent on transport in London wasn't funding things like fake jobs to carry people to massive pensions because TFL employees can't be made redundant.
What have you got against TfL employees?
> 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.
What data is this based on?
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...
3 years late is practically early in UK infrastructure! HS2 was originally due to open in December! We're a decade off at least.
I feel that's more "US public transport being bad"
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.
London and Berlin felt pretty comparable to me, with the airport situation better in London but the biking situation better in Berlin (marginally).
Tokyo is just on another level entirely.
You should visit Taipei.
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.
It doesn't matter what most Americans want, because most urban land is zoned in such a way that single-family houses are all that is legal to build. The extremely high prices of housing units in central urban areas suggest that demand for dense cities, public transit, and shared spaces greatly exceeds the artificially-restricted supply.
Here in Seattle, you can basically see the zoning boundaries as you drive around the city, because development always goes right up to the edge, as hard as it can. Without the arbitrary limits imposed by the zoning code, there would be a whole lot more condos built (and lived in!), and those edges would be a lot softer, shaped by ebbs and flows of market demand rather than the sharp lines of law.
Genuinely dense cities basically don't exist in the U.S. The average "dense" city downtown in a U.S. city is broadly comparable to the worst car-dependent suburban or exurbian hellscapes of Europe and East Asia, and things only go worse from there. City downtowns near the East Coast are an exception since they were built in colonial times or thereabouts, so when you think "dense" you should really think of e.g. the densest boroughs in NYC.
Yes and that reflects historical and cultural factors. Cities in Europe were largely built in the preindustrial era. In the U.S. there is just so much more space; it does not make sense to build small or dense. Transportation habits just reflect this.
You make it sound like the construction of US cities were not at all lobbied by the auto industry back in the day and that urban sprawl was exclusively people's choice.
> American who's never been to large Asian cities like Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing
30% of all Americans have never left the North Western hemisphere.
There are 20+ countries in the Northwest hemisphere.
Since I can't edit, that should say 70% :) I reversed the figures
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.
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.
A lot of European cities still have Roman centres.
Indeed - and some are even older. I believe romans still had horse and cart.
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.
How dare you get in the way of my fat ass in my fat-ass SUV. Almost spill my capuccino that I bought at the drive-thru because I couldn't get my fat ass off the car.
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.
I wouldnt call dc's metro "great", maybe relative to other cities, it is, but globally it's subpar. Often late, dirty, limited reach etc
Thanks, good to know! How are the trains across the country though?
Trains are not an efficient use of time for travel within the US.
The US is huge. If you were take a 300mph (nearing 500kph) train (which would make it the fastest train in the world), it would be OVER an 8 hour trip from New York to LA. (Again, about 2500 miles or 4000k)
Even in some of the densest areas, the trip times end up being pretty long due to distances: dc to New York? 600 kilometers or almost 400 miles.
People aren't taking trains from Madrid to Tallinn, either.
The proper point of comparison here is more medium length trips. There's no reason not to have a high speed train for Portland - Seattle - Vancouver, for example.
This is irrelevant, though, since the size of the country isn’t what determines where people go. It’s not like trains got less practical when Alaska got admitted to the union.
Sprawling, low density, single use zoning, combined with parking minimums, have much more to do with it.
Here’s a video that explores the topic if you’re curious https://youtu.be/REni8Oi1QJQ
The question was what the train network is like outside the cities. And the answer is we don’t use trains because it is not efficient for the scale of the country. This is correct.
Most people ARE interested in coast to coast travel. It is called flyover country for a reason.
There are a few exceptions like the Baltimore corridor, or the San Francisco peninsula, and these are in fact serviced by good trains.
Train travel from LA to NY wouldn't be efficient, but there are plenty of population poles like LA to SF where train travel would make sense and a network of those could make cross country travel feasible if not in a hurry. But as the GP pointed out, it is not that useful if you can arrive to LA by train, if then when you arrive you need to rent a car before you've even left the station.
It is always shocking to me when I land at an airport in the US and there no public transport available.
It is common for conversations about good local public transport to have a retort in some sub-thread about how big the US is, as if the feasibility of long distance travel affected the feasibility of other modes of local travel.
You mention the SF peninsula. When I first moved there, I lived in the westside of SF and had friends living in Sunnyvale. On a weekend, it took 4 hs to get to Mountain View (~40miles, at the time, checking now it seems like Caltrain weekend service might have improved, so the same trip would take about 2hs), and then had to be picked up by car to finish the rest of the trip. It was faster (~3:30hs, if more expensive) to go from Paris to Amsterdam (>300miles) by train.
It is highly relevant to the question asked. What you’re addressing is how cities should be built.
The question asked was about cross country trains.
How long would it take from New York to Philadelphia, or Boston to DC? How long would it take between San Diego and SF? What about a train between Chicago and Detroit?
We're building a fast train from Toronto to Quebec city in Canada. It's going to be a lot more comfortable and way faster than driving. A MP in my family takes the train from Montreal to Ottawa very frequently, they don't want to bother with parking in the capital and they can work on the train.
NY to Philadelphia is relatively fast. There was a faster train on that route even before Acela (Metroliner). Boston to DC is a fairly long day by train and, while I've done it, no business person who is really on a schedule is going to vs. taking a pretty short flight. (And, if you're really going city to city, both cities have close-in airport options.)
> What about a train between Chicago and Detroit?
I've ridden the Wolverine, it isn't half bad.
I 100% agree trains might be underfunded in the US. The LA to NY flight will stay preferred to a hypothetical high speed train due to time. It is unlikely ever to be less than 10 hours.
For train rides under 4 hours, and if you can get trains running smoothly (less stops), the time spent on the train and the overall integration of trains is a lot better as a mode of transportation.
I see your point, but consider this: getting to and through a major airport is a huge pain the ass. Trains also tend to take you to city centers more often than airports, which almost always need to be a significant distance from anything interesting due to the noise.
Let's take a hypothetical scenario:
- 5 hours flight time (average for NY and LA), 2 hours on each side to get to and from the airport to the actual city. Total is 9 hours.
- 10 hours train time and 1 hour on each end (which is generous given the proximity of train stations to city centers), 12 hours.
The difference is not that much, and a train ride is so much less faff than a flight that it's not even funny. Little to no security theater, you don't get fondled by security agents, you don't have to stand hours in line with silly passport controls and luggage checkins/pickups. And the list goes on.
A good train infrastructure can be vastly more pleasant than a good air infrastructure. Where air wins out is intercontinental flights where trains are truly not an option anymore.
If you’re taking more than a half hour to get from the city center to the airport, you’re doing it wrong.
Eh, you're overselling it. Even in a hypothetical world with a 12 hour train trip, it still loses to an 8 hour plane trip.
You're losing an entire day on the train. You still have to deal with luggage pains, now you're eating on the transportation which will be inferior, and will have similar problems with last mile transportation.
Flying is currently not a great 8 hour experience, but it beats losing an entire day. I can do LA to NY for a weekend trip. (I personally wouldn't but there are some that would for sure)
Trains can and do make sense even in the US, and we do ourselves great harm by underinvesting in them, but there will always be a place for plane travel.
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.
It's pretty good in NYC. I heard it's nice in Boston too.
Compared to rest of US? Maybe. Compared to Europe? Absolutely not.
I don't think so, the busiest lines of the London subway ("tube") don't even have AC.
I also rode the subway in Paris some years ago and it wasn't anything to write home about.
If they ran the suburban rail more frequently Boston would have a phenomenal system.
The suburban rail in Boston is very much commuter rail. I live about 50 miles west (pretty near a station though I have to drive) and I'll absolutely take it for a 9-5ish urban event. But it's completely useless for anything in the evening.
NJ Transit is commuter rail and they made it not suck by providing usable evening and weekend service.
Different cities. Different transport situations. I'm not convinced I would take commuter rail in and out of where I live to Boston even if it ran more frequently. Chicken and egg and all that but it's empty in the evening as it is.
Even the reverse commute in the evening is annoying but then it's quite straightforward to go home. There are usually reasonable parking options. Personally, not sure I'd use it outside of rush-hour in and back.
The point is, NJT had poor limited service 25 years ago and rectified it.
Its good in NYC for american standards. For european standards the NYC subway is abominable. The smells, the grime, the homeless, its honestly like visiting the 6th ring of hell. Source: I am a european living in NYC.
It’s not much different from Paris subway. We should still strive for better - Taipei is a much better model than any European city.
Paris as a city has gone very downhill the past 5-10 years. The subway there is a prime example.
I haven’t been to Paris in more than 5 years. It was disgusting before.
The bitter truth.
I've visited Paris and London a few months ago as a tourist.
I am really impressed by London public transport, both the classical red double deck buses and the subway.
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.
Hah, the joys of optimising your morning commute on the Underground.
“If I stand here on the platform, then the door will open right in front of me, and I’ll be exactly at the exit of the next platform where I need to change…”
Yeah or “the signs all say to walk down this long passage, and then back via a circuitous route for flow control, but my destination is actually 100 feet away through this unmarked passage so I’ll just go that way” situation at Bank
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.
> But what is also expensive is every single citizen taking $100 Uber rides to the airport, like in NYC.
Last time I went to NYC I took the AirTrain to Jamaica station and then an express train to Penn. it took like 35 minutes total.
That cost doesn't show up on government books, so we can pretend it doesn't exist. The joys of decentral planning.
Wrong, $100 Uber rides boost employment and the economy! (Just ignore the impacts of congestion, wasted time, road spending)
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.
It's a massive investment in the areas near its stations.
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.
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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.
It's not that the founders have smaller ambitions, it's that they can't find fundings to really grow the size of US tech companies.
And when they do find fundings, it's in US so they move their company there.
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 friend of mine used: From these point of views, there are a lot of wonderful SMEs that need to see the ligth. They should be supported by the government and the community, but they need very different tools from what we define as startups.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
You say this as if venture capital is lying there on the ground for anyone to pick up. What VC do you know that aren't investing in companies that want to grow very quickly (or in companies that they then force to grow quickly)?
> A company that just started that can scale to 100M evaluation in less than 5 years.
How can you assign a name to something based on what might happen in < 5 years ?
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.
To me a startup is something that's not yet profitable
so every government is a startup?
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.
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 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.
https://xcancel.com/aakashgupta/status/2016375397131420005
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.
hopefully soon down to 48h with EU-INC
Just like the EU forced Germany to to stop prosecuting coffee shops for having public wifi.
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
Startups might thrive there, but business investment in England (particularly in mature businesses) has not exactly been lively ever since Brexit. I can't recall the last time I heard someone talking favorably about investing in England, or at all, really.
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..
Or since the anti-corruption reforms of 2015-2018.
Which frustratingly overlap with Brexit, making it hard to tell whether this is “good driving business away” or “bad driving business away.”
First I've heard of this - which anti-corruption reforms?
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.
I was going to reply to grandparent that only flat prices are coming down because of rising service charge costs, and being hard to mortgage because of cladding issues.
But after some research it is indeed true that house prices are, to a lesser extent, also going down, at least in real terms, if not nominal.
I actually wrote a webapp to show this, check it out - https://housepricedashboard.co.uk/
London house prices are falling quite a lot in real terms.
This is pretty good! Nice.
Have you ever considered adding more countries?
Nice work. Have you considered add real terms changes?
Already a feature, you can switch between nominal or inflation adjusted in the Change View panel -https://housepricedashboard.co.uk/?tab=change&start=2014&end...
I am getting DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN.
Ah shoot, it's not .com, it's .co.uk. So https://housepricedashboard.co.uk.
ERR_CONNECTION_RESET. HN hug of death?
Probably office firewall
In multiple UK regions, but the most expensive ones and London the most.
Its coming down but from a very high level in London.
I do not know about other countries, but movements do tend to be wide spread (at least across similar economies). We are seeing higher interest rates in a lot of countries and they are the main determinant of the multiple of income properties sell at.
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!
I was going to add "coming into a pub in Wales and complaining about the occupants switching to Welsh", but that is a slightly different scenario. Partly because Welsh is much rarer.
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.
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.
I don't think so. Like sure, if you're a Bangladeshi living in Tower Hamlets you could probably get away with a limited life speaking only Bengali, but you could say the same about Spanish in swathes of the US. Realistically, you need English.
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.
It's not true. Where have you heard it?
There has been quite a lot of popular YouTubers spreading this.
One of them is Kurt Caz.
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46809291)
You should watch the video someone linked that exposes one of his many shady stuff.
> English no longer functions reliably as the default public language
Absolutely false. My god! Have you even been to London? Stop consuming propaganda from Twitter/X and Facebook. It isn't good for your mental health.
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.
No
Nope
nope
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.
40+km, every day? Or even if total, it's a proper distance. I'm fascinated by that. Do you just walk around randomly or do you plan things you want to see ?
Walking is imo one of the big "secret" ways to get to know a city. I fondly recall just getting lost on purpose in major cities, and at the end of the day take a taxi, or bus, or tuk-tuk back to the place I was staying. So many things seen, and tried, and random people encountered from all walks of life, it's one of the best things.
Yeah I was doing a challenge of walking entirely across the city, from Woolwich to Heathrow. I think I made it to about Chiswick before my phone died and it was too dark to keep recording on my GoPro. So maybe 30-35k or so that day, and another 20k or so the day before and after just exploring the city more informally.
Agreed that walking is the best way to see a city, for sure. I have done similar one day walks across Brooklyn, Manhattan, etc. and always really enjoy the experience. Usually I have a kind of set goal, like “walk entirely across X place.” I think in Istanbul though I mostly just wandered for 100km (over the course of a week.)
This past summer I walked about 124km around Paris over 5-6 days, going in a spiral through all the arrondissements. That was a great way to discover some new neighborhoods.
Man, we would get along.
I completely agree, it's fantastic both for general fitness, and as a way of exploring. I do this on a smaller scale on a daily basis, walking the 8-10 km route to or from my work (when we have office days). This is walkable in about 1.5 hours, public transport would get me home in around 45 minutes, so I am not really investing much extra time. Varying the route slightly keeps things interesting, and you get a surprising variety with small (1 to 2 street) changes.
Another favourite of mine is cycling around a neighbourhood to get to know it; you get a totally different feel for things than from a car - things typically go by slower, and you are somehow just far more able to observe things.
What the hell are you doing wrong? I never eat the same thing twice in London?!?
But are the places you’re eating 1) fairly affordable and 2) quick / fast food and not a proper sit down restaurant?
I had an extremely difficult time finding places with those requirements. Everything seemed to require sitting down for at least 20-30 minutes, which didn’t fit my walking schedule.
I didn’t have the same problem in NYC or Paris, where it’s very easy to find a variety of places to grab a kebab, baguette sandwich, pizza slice, dumplings, etc.
Yeah definitely affordable and quick. And can get all of those in London with zero effort. Most of the time I just search for food on Google Maps and pick something which doesn't look poisonous.
For example, going here tomorrow at lunch time https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/food-and-drink/southbank-c... - will work out what I'll eat when I get there.
> 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.
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,
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.
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.
LA is much less dense than London so maybe you need concentration for those things, but we don't. We don't really have monocultural ghettoes. The beauty of London is how dense and intermixed it is. Cheek by jowl, as Shakespeare wrote.
Restaurant density
Did you know 82% of stats are made-up? You've not bothered with a source or even any units. Poor effort.
That’s per person, not per unit area, and the figure for London is incorrect as per any information I could find.
I would say [even] Berlin is better than London.
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.
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).
Unless if you plan on eating cheap kebabs or inauthentic asian food, a good meal in london is gonna cost you at least 20 pounds
Nonsense. I sat down with 3 plates of legit Japanese BBQ + rice and soup today for £18. Right behind Oxford Circus.
Having spent some of my life on UK, I would rather live in Bristol or Cardiff, and travel to London on per need basis, than be located there.
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.
You can do that in any big international city. NYC, LA, SF, Tokyo, Paris, Berlin, and I'm probably missing a lot of them. Way more than "1 or 2".
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.
Definitely, even Mumbai and Bangalore.
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...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Liveability_Index
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.
London has a special microclimate and pleasant weather all year around. No extremes and less rain than other parts of the country.
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.
Winters are dull, wet and dark. But I quite enjoy springs and even most summers.
> 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.
Yes I really wish people saying "X is the best place to live in the world" would add where else they have lived, otherwise their opinion is not very useful to me.
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.
It was one of the best places to live in up until about 10 years ago.
Places I have lived in: London, Santiago, Rio de Janeiro, Miami, New York, San Francisco.
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.
Where can I find a list of food unavailable outside of its origin?
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.
This is incredibly true even of things you wouldn't expect - Mexican food in Southern California is just different than Ohio even if you cook it yourself - because the ingredients may be labelled the same, but they're not.
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.
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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
My eyes..
Where is this CSV from?
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...
Another British company swallowed by the US :(
Yeah, lots of examples of that happening. Runna was the latest one I can remember. I won't be suprised at all if ElevenLabs is bought out by a big US player soon.
At least Elon Musk didn’t end up getting it, which he tried before Google swooped in.
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.
> but everyone else is struggling.
I wonder what's you definition of struggling, especially "everyone else"
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.
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).
The short answer is that you have to be pretty well off to start with to be a founder.
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
I mean, by comparison to the booming US market, paying for London talent is becoming an absolute bargain...
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.
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...
And also, IG Group is a British company, HQ'd in London, traded on the London Stock Exchange. "British stock trading company acquired by British stock trading company" is a pretty boring event.
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
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42767986
[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42763734
There's an argument that some of these takeovers should have been blocked.
> enabled by London’s shrinking public markets
That doesn't seem to be true?
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.
In football we’d call the US “tap-in merchants”.
As a tangent, I'm seeing Lisbon trying to make a lot of buzz, but it seemingly can't crack into the larger ecosystem. What's missing, considering that it should be able to benefit from its EU integration?
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.
Funny how San Francisco can't fit the chart they have. League of its own I guess.
It truly is. I've seen multiple pre-seed startups and founders burn significant amounts of personal capital in order to land an O-1A visa because of how much capital and mentorship is available here.
Is the juice worth the squeeze?
Then you'd feel like it's not you/your idea/your company but the ecosytem at large
This checks out. I live in Silicon Valley but now work for a startup in London. Same vibe, less attitude.
They are not the same. The energy/resources in SF/SV are 5x at a minimum - but London has it going on.
Working for London startups in the past, I've found they're much more polite, but much less honest and straightforward. There's a layer of britishness you have to get past sometimes to get to what people really want instead of directness.
As a Brit when I started doing deals in North America one of the things I picked up was that I had to be explicit about disagreement OR where a decision was not being made yet. In the UK during a negotiation a 'silence' is not equal to agreement or disagreement, it's a NO-OP. If I didn't do this then prospective customers/suppliers in the USA would believe that I'd agreed to their request when from my perspective I had merely noted that they'd asked for something. Has anyone else run into this?
The other one that's confusing is that "tabling" something means the complete opposite.
I would separate 'politeness' and 'indirectness' a bit. I generally agree about 'politeness', there are plenty social forms that Brits still follow. For example I found the language/manner of New York attorneys pretty 'aggressive' the first few times.
Indirectness, is definitely a thing - Brits speak to each other or signal disagreement in ways that's clear to another Brit, but maybe not others. The use of silence, but also some words that depending on tone can mean different things which I think is difficult for North American's to interpret.
best reasoning I've heard for this is that English is subtext heavy, like Japanese due to the history of the aristocracy. The populace were in thrall to their feudal lords and the aristocracy as serfs and servant classes for so long, that being indirect has been embedded into the language as a defense mechanism to not upset the pay masters. We get the subtext but people new to our culture might not.
I remember a technological mess being present at work and my team lead bringing out the classic:
> it's not ideal is it?
or the classic Jeeves and Wooster valet/aristocrat relationship with Jeeves giving it the:
> as you say sir
> very good sir
with both statements being flexible but often being delivered with the dripping subtext of "yeah that's complete bollocks".[0]
Obviously this doesn't apply to the real working classes but then those types are not the sort to gain a STEM education.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s03Fq1nsbng
(The full scene is around 11:30 in the first episode and I think its captures a conversation of subtext and indirectness quite well).
> it's not ideal is it?
Oh jeez, I've literally just typed out a message on Teams to describe a situation where someone deployed breaking DB changes without the accompanied app changes as "a less-than-ideal scenario". Sometimes I forget I have to translate from British for the benefit of everyone else on the team (half in India, half in US, one German)
> English is subtext heavy, like Japanese
My stock joke is that one of these countries is a feudal warrior culture and former empire that's obsessed with tea and saving face, and the other is Japan.
> yeah that's complete bollocks
We say "interesting" for that
Yeah SF is 10x every other place in earth. People that think things are comparable have never lived here.
10x more insufferable tech bros too? I've never lived there true, but I've spent some time there to know this place isn't for me.
How's the comp? From HN I had gotten the feeling that the UK was worse than most of western europe in that regard.
Depends on the company, but typical junior salaries are £35-45k a year, mid level around £50-65k year and senior somewhere between £65-85k a year. Obviously you have FAANG who pay significantly more and finance firms, but they are not the majority, and I've hired or have friends being paid in these ranges who are extremely talented and from top unis.
Upper ranges for all levels accross the very highest paying employees are £100-400k when including bonuses usually. Usually these are quant/quant-dev jobs and FAANG.
According to levels.fyi London is basically the best paying non-US city, I think maybe beaten by some Swiss cities.
I've always found levels.fyi to be a little pessimistic for the UK when compared with commercially-available benchmarking services.
I suspect it's because people on PAYE tend to think of their basic salary + bonus + income tax, but disregard NICS, pension, paid holidays, and other benefits. They end up reporting a total package that's 10-20% lower than it actually is.
Bruder, komm nach Berlin or frère, allez à Paris
I arrive in 2026. Decide to start a startup. By the year 2038, the state mandated reader of legal documents has finished reading out aloud to me and my co-founder. Now we find a VC. His documents need to be read to us both. But the Y2K38 problem strikes. He thinks we are in the year 1970. He needs to read us the "ancient company addendum". While he's reading he chokes and keels over, dead from the emissions from his Volkswagen. Our ARR may be zero, but what about our government grants? Also zero.
My friend. He starts in France in 2026. The government mandates that the retiree earnings to worker earnings ratio must be fixed by law to what it was in 2025: 130%. For every employee I hire, I must also pay a retiree 1.3 times his salary. He visits me via train in 2038. I ask him how his trip was. Turns out he actually got on Deutsche Bahn train back then in 2026. I just didn't know because he spent all his time on Twitter explaining why the US approach to startups won't work. He's lucky. Pretty short delay for DB train.
This was crafted with a subtlety that captures the continental combination of infrastructural petrification and untethered pride perfectly. Wonderful
Reminds me of how often you hear Austrian Railways announcing that they apologize for the late running of a train "which was subject to delays in a neighbouring land". They never name which country but it's always Germany.
Error 404, Berlin apartment not found, or current tenant wants 11k for "the furniture" if I want the honor to be allowed to rent the apartment
Come to Germany, the letters from Rundfunkbeitrag and Waldorf Frommer are already waiting for you!
You've not heard of the UK's TV license then.
Oh come on. You get the BBC for that money. I gladly pay it byt then I work in tech.
The big disadvantage is wages, and how everything is so...formal and bureaucratic, for lack of better terms.
For example, I couldn't even hope to get employment in tech in the UK or Europe without a degree. Work hours and wages too, less pay given the tradeoffs makes sense, but getting paid more than others for the same role is a big problem, even if you have more skill/talent/experience. Or simply working long hours on salaried jobs, with the understanding that when the spring or whatever hacking cycle is over, you can take it easier, that's hard because of the formalities, laws,etc...
Perhaps the term I'm looking for is "inflexible"?
On the other hand, the reason all of that is not a problem here in the US is "bottom-line oriented" thinking, and that ultimately leads to everything getting enshittified.
It feels like the UK and EU think they're happy with where their society is at, and they mostly want to keep things afloat? The type of thinking that goes with startups involves risk taking and experimentation outside of zones of comfort, or even outright laws sometimes.
Would all these AI companies get away with scraping the internet if they were based in the UK or EU? I'm not saying they should, I'm saying look at the big picture results vs near-term stability and comforts.
If I were British or European, I would want local and/or regional wages to be high, trade surpluses to make sense, foreign dependency to be minimal, military to be strong, so that social welfare subsidies, and all the nice pro-human laws won't require so much sacrifice. The US had been (no longer) in that position, but our deep political divisions and prevalent sub-cultures of cruelty prevented us from going that extra step and having the best of both worlds for everyone.
Do you have an experience working in Europe or the UK?
> I couldn't even hope to get employment in tech in the UK or Europe without a degree
Maybe this is how it looks from the outside, but it's not how it works in reality.
My evidence is I've been working in 'tech' for 25 years and having hired people across the UK, Europe and North America. Tech is one of the most accessible career paths, particularly for areas that are novel and expanding rapidly - consequently direct experience of an area is the important currency.
Often roles will advertise a 'degree' or equivalent industry experience. The only roles I can think of where this could be an issue is trying to join a large corporate organisation in their 'graduate' programme (e.g. a major bank), but that's the same situation in the USA as well.
I have no experience working in the UK, my impression is entirely based on what people there have told me. I've also looked at job postings there. In the US you'll see "or equivalent experience" tacked on, but not in UK, Canada, EU job posts I've seen so far. But I'm very glad to hear you say it's different.
I've had a similar career, and the only time I've ever been asked about my education was towards the end of the hiring process with a major US-based tech company back in the early 2010s.
No UK employer has ever asked about it, to my knowledge.
Sounds more like a company problem than a London problem. Wages also - the distribution is very wide.
What about taxes ?
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?
Isn’t it the same deal in every major tech hub?
London is #1 at that. You earn a bit more than rest of europe but everything is way more expensive
In other European "tech hubs" you're not going to find a job or will not be able to rent anything.
Or you can come to SF and live in your car or at the gym.
The math works out for almost every HCOL area. Your salary is higher. Rent is high too but people either choose to live further away or accept a smaller apartment/condo.
London has a big commuting radius with strong regional transit (as maligned as it is).
> London has a big commuting radius with strong regional transit (as maligned as it is).
yes, you can quite easily live 50 miles out and be at your desk in under an hour
As long as you don't use trains.
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%
it wasn't even close to 15% of my net income when I was 25
and it certainly isn't now that I'm quite a bit older, and I earn a multiple of what I did then
Using hyperbolic percentages harms your point, it doesn’t help it.
But yeah you’re right dude, we live in a society. We work to support ourselves. What a shocking surprise.
Smells like marketing stuff.. there are plenty of other places that i think are better.
It's not based on marketing, it appears to be based on metrics like amount of venture capital raised.
It should be based on the number of successes relative to the amount raised or ROI and that picture is quite different. In that sense London is way behind SV.
The article doesn't dispute that London is way behind SV. What it's saying is that for non-US funding, London dominates.
But it isn't true. For the rest of the world SV is still the place to go to, one way or another. The difference is just too big. What you could say is that London is the place to try to raise money if you can't raise in SV. But you'll have to realize that your chances of success are dramatically lower that way to the point that you're going to end up a with a small fraction of the stock yourself after the inevitable dilution through follow up rounds because you couldn't raise a large enough round to begin.
VC in London is harsh, both for the start-ups and for the VCs. What does happen is that a company manages to stay alive long enough to raise a secondary round in the USA, but then you can't really make the original claim in the TFA.
> But it isn't true. For the rest of the world SV is still the place to go to, one way or another.
We are using different meanings for the same phrase. SV is the best place to raise, IF YOU CAN AND ARE WILLING TO RAISE THERE. But not everyone can, nor does everyone want to. And of the locations that are not in the US, London dominates.
And hell, Americans raise in Boston, Seattle, NYC, and so on. Not even all Americans move to SV, let alone people who may not even get a visa to enter the US.
Given that London has little else going for it other than a financial industry it's not surprising money is raised and companies are registered there.
That said I don't know anyone doing a startup in London. But I know dozens in Berlin without even thinking about it.
Eh, I know quite a few. LegalTech, hardware, obviously fintech, quite a bit of AI. But I work at a London startup so my social circle might be different to yours.
Having a London domicile often leads to an overstating in venture capital raised for the UK ecosystem.
For example, I've funded Polish and Indian startups that chose the UK as their legal domicile because we couldn't be bothered to hire a legal team to draft a contract to Polish or Indian specifications.
Builder.ai [0] is a great example of that - it was an Indian startup that was domiciled in London to simplify raising capital from Gulf investors.
[0] - https://www.ft.com/content/926f4969-fda7-4e78-b106-4888c8704...
Does this also impact US metrics for capital raised? My understanding is that the Delaware C-Corp is still the startup standard for founders from anywhere in the world to raise global capital, which I imagine skews where the capital actually ends up flowing if they are actually building a company in a foreign location and just using the Delaware entity as a holding co.
Somewhat, but not to the degree as you see in the UK, Singapore, or HK.
Until a couple years ago, it was difficult for someone without a SSN to create a Delaware C-Corp and even despite current political instability, the depth of IP, capital, and R&D available in the US is difficult to replicate outside China, Japan, and maybe India.
Startups like Builder AI use London because a.) they want to raise money from filthy rich Arab investors and b.) those guys are not known for doing much due diligence. They go more by vibes and hype and who's on the existing cap table. Also c.) they are very comfortable with London because it was so much easier back in the day to launder or siphon away funds from their home countries. London is an extremely popular destination for Gulf Arabs.
You'll get a lot of shady startups of that kind in London for this reason.
Not all Arab investors are bad - for example, funds associated with the Emirate of Abu Dhabi (eg. ADIA, Mubadala) has been extremely successful in their investments explicitly because Tahnoon studied engineering in San Diego (and rolled at Gracie's gym) back in the day.
Additonally, for every failed investment like builder.ai a fund like QIA and MS Ventures has had multiple other successful investments.
The perception of "shadiness" in the London VC scene arises simply because a subset of non-American VC simply does not care about value investing and product-led growth.
Additonally, it's not like the UK doesn't have good VCs and Growth Equity investors - for example Index Ventures and Ballie Guiffold both have a solid track record.
Being overly congratulatory and being overly pessimistic about the UK scene does more harm than good.
For you specifically that may be true, but the numbers say London dominates by far.
Sand Hill road
That would be pretty funny to say. Where are America's startups founded? Principally the San Francisco Bay Area. What about the Rest of the World? Oh, principally the San Francisco Bay Area.
It reminds me of the funny fact that for years I worked at a building in Bush St. that was nice but not particularly remarkable only to find out that that's where Saudi Aramco was originally headquartered when some Twitter post counted them for the Bay Area for their "Where are the top market capped public companies from?" segment.
Could you give only a few examples from those PLENTY of other places that are better? Like the first 10 that come to your mind, you made me very curious!
Not the person you asked but I am thinking of France and Germany. France has Station F (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Station_F).
There are also Portugal, Spain and Romania that are rising contenders. I am also very dubious of UK being "world first"
I'm waiting for the yearly "Waterloo is the Silicon Valley of Canada" article that always fails to deliver its promise.
I grew up in Waterloo but it's just not it lol.
Which makes me all the more disappointed that Birmingham (close to me) doesn't have a better startup ecosystem. It is an ideal place to benefit from London (little over an hour away) without the crazy prices. Anyone here based around the midlands, say hello / "alright bab"....
London seems equally incredible & terrible.
I personally think Wyoming will be the capital of startups, especially 30 N Gould Str is going to be the street of world's startups.
No no you simple minded USAmerican. It's obviously going to be Uruguay, its on it's way to transform from MonteVideo to MonteLLM /s
I'm not an american :)
London is tax hell. When tou start to have a family it quickly escalates to the mosr expensive place on earth by far
That's got to be why one UK VC after another is closing their doors.
> That's got to be why one UK VC after another is closing their doors.
One after another? The only one that closed office was Andreessen Horowitz.
What's the "another"? I don't know why all the London threads attract this kind of dishonest comments!
London is the money laundering capital of Europe [1]. The entire London property market has been propped up by Russian kleptocrats [2]. I'm not saying startup money is (necessarily) illegal or at least dubious in origin. I am saying that London's banking and legal system heavily favors companies and invetors. And that's the point. It's the same reason Delaware is the de facto standard for incorporation for American companies.
Granted, English is widely spoken in London and that's factor for cross-pollination of talent between the US and the UK. It also has an easier visa situation than the US.
On top of that, salaries in tech in London are much lower than the US [3]. The cost of living in London is actually pretty awful.
London's biggest problem is that the UK is no longer in the EU. Long term I see this as a strategic problem because (IMHO) the EU is going to be incentivized and ultimately forced to make their own versions of key US tech companies in much the same way as China has. And the EU won't want that outside of EU jurisdiction. It defeats the point.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/14/nearly...
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/mar/06/how-london-b...
[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17462135
well, the split is both ways. lets not forget that depite a lot of talk and wish-casting, the EU is still largely impotent. I know for sure that I am envious of my colleagues in the US. but europe? hmm...
regarding the Russian kleptocrat situation, you can't knock London for having a Profitable Business Arrangement. The biggest enemy of any Russian oligarch are other Russian oligarchs. it makes sense then, to keep your dragon hoard where none of them can touch it (possibly not even you!)
ofcourse it becomes even funnier when all of them get the same idea, converging on the same optimal strategy...
indeed any and all mafiosos are welcome to safeguard their assets in London banks (for a price, and not neccesarily monetary.) whatever happened to the venezuelan gold? if that then serves to subsidize the rest of the UK ordinary citizenry, hey, you could say the UK in the business of karmic repayment.
So London feels less like a Silicon Valley replacement and more like the world's best startup nursery
London's basically great for:
It's not as good as Silicon Valley for any of these, but no-where is. It's also not that good if you're trying to IPO, again no-where is compared to the USA.For start-ups/high-growth you get a pretty good business environment (legal/corporate and day-to-day running a company is reasonably straightforward), employees with skills and the employment law is pretty flexible, there's plenty of finance around.
For Growth and USA companies that are expanding into Europe then London/UK is somewhat easier to understand than other European geo's. There's an aligned language and there's more cultural touchpoints - it's kind of a mid-point culturally/institutionally between Europe/USA.
For funding/driving to late-stage and IPO there just isn't anywhere like the USA. But everyone has to expand to North America eventually, so it can be fixed at that point. Also, PE funding has changed a lot in the last 10 years, so if you're not on the 1-in-1000 rocketships there's a more steady 'good' path which is totally viable.
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While startup capital flows in, the growth story is very different, and for those living in the UK, it isn't what it seems.
There aren't any jobs in the UK and most are offshored to other low CoL countries.
Young people, founders are leaving for other places like Dubai, Singapore and even SF for higher paying jobs.
This is generally how it is. For the entry level market you have a realistic choice of 5 companies like Barclays, BT, Amazon, SKY for limited positions while competing against the world for them. A fresh linkedin job post for tech even for no-name companies gets a 100+ applicants in under an hour starting at 30k salaries. I'm not even sure which startups are hiring graduates except maybe from Oxbridge. It is obvious a lot of people commenting particularly in this thread are ultra-privileged expats where "London" is just zone 1 for them and are well connected in the industry. They probably don't even know what Morley's is. Living costs along with the high tax rates alone will eat up your income and I know British people who work in international bank's at senior positions complaining about these things and about mass immigration all the time.
This doesn't seem true, I work in a UK tech company and it's an incredibly international team. My team has three Brits (including me), a Norwegian, a Swede, a Pole, and an American. The CEO is Irish, the CTO is German/American.
Obviously that's just one data point, but every tech company is similar.