The Clustering of Financial Services in London*

seminar or lunch - it’s important people can leave the office and come back in the
afternoon - there’s a convenience point of view.

3.6 Disadvantages of a London Location

The two most pressing problems for firms in the London financial services cluster are
the cost of premises and transport difficulties, local, national and international (Table 10).
The cost of premises is the single most highly ranked factor across the whole questionnaire.
However, this finding needs to be interpreted with care. To an extent, a cluster’s success
can be measured by increasing rents. The key question is: does this lead to the movement
of valuable activity out of the cluster? As discussed in the next section, we found the
answer to this question to be “no”. If activity does move out, it tends to be less valuable
activity.

Table 10: Disadvantages of a London Location

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