any new clusters that are not in close proximity to existing concentration as illustrated by
the following interview extracts:
We (the UK) won’t be able to afford to put up new infrastructure projects in
Huddersfield or Glasgow if the UK plc doesn’t make the money that it needs to in
London. If London is seen by certain people in government as just another English
city - disaster.
We did look at moving to Reading and we looked at the costs of moving there as
opposed to staying in the City ... it’s the services, security, suppliers etc., etc. which
wouldn’t be available outside the concentration . Without IT infrastructure and
specialists we die.
If people say, we don’t like what’s going on in the City, we’re going to create a new
financial industrial complex somewhere, say Reading, that’s engineering, that’s not
going to work.
What you have in London is a European regional center servicing the largest
companies in Europe. For example, even a large global investment bank which has
let’s say 250 people in Frankfurt, they will service German companies part out of
Frankfurt but they’ll still service them out of London as well and that isn’t going to
happen from Manchester.
For a US company, given the choice, they could just about get their mind to Windsor
i.e., outside London but if you said to their employees in Atlanta, we’re moving you to
Blackburn to work in our European head office, they’d all head for the hills.
We considered as part of our strategic plan for this area whether we might review the
lease on this building given that a lot of the building is used for back office activity.
And perhaps it wasn’t necessary to be bang in the middle of the City and we didn’t
want to go to Croydon or Bangladesh or Manchester, so we thought about London
Bridge.
I suppose I see Canary Wharf more as overspill than as a separate cluster . it is
surprisingly difficult to get people in different offices to act as part of the same team .
we have one big x office in the UK and it’s much more cohesive (than between offices
in 7-8 German cities). I think if that sort of competition between regional centers is
replicated, it must damage the whole.
4 Conclusions and Policy Recommendations
The principal conclusion of this study is that London has a dynamic and successful
financial services cluster which works in line with extant knowledge of the clustering
phenomenon. Clustering continues to be important in spite of the costs associated with
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