Silicon Roundabout Densely Packed With IT Presence

We all knew East London’s ‘Silicon Roundabout’ is home to a lot of tech firms, but just how popular is this tiny corner of the UK?

According to the inaugural London Hubs Tracker from Stirling Ackroyd, a study of every single registered business in the country, the ‘Silicon Roundabout’ hosts 70 times the density of tech firms, than any other location in the UK, from Manchester to Glasgow.

London’s EC1V postal district, adjoining the famous ‘Silicon’ Roundabout, is home to nearly eight times (7.83x) the density of registered technology companies than Manchester’s ‘Silicon Mill’, the densest postal district for technology companies outside of London.

Compared to other hubs across the country, the capital’s core EC1V tech district is 16 times more densely packed than Birmingham’s B3 (the ‘Silicon Canal’), 17 times Brighton’s BN3 district (‘Silicon Pier’), 20 times Bristol’s BS1 (‘Silicon Gorge’) and 33 times the concentration of tech business in Glasgow’s ‘Silicon Glen’ in the G2 area.

Across the capital there are 58 tech firms for every square kilometre, or nearly fifty times the density of technology businesses than across the whole UK (just 1.2 tech firms per km2).

However at the very peak, Silicon Roundabout’s EC1V postal district, this density is more than fifty times denser again, with 3,228 tech firms packed into every square kilometre.

This is more than twice even the second-placed area, the neighbouring EC2A on the other side of the Old Street roundabout. Here tech firms are clustered at a density of 1,580 per km2.

Andrew Bridges, managing director of Stirling Ackroyd, comments, “At the bright heart of Britain’s technology industry, there’s an entrepreneurial startup spirit to the Old Street area that’s creating its own gravitational force. Social media is the Bloomberg of the 21st century, HTML is our new lingua franca, and Shoreditch is fast becoming the Canary Wharf of the 2020s.