Why London? London Tech Week and the capital’s enduring appeal
As London Tech Week approaches, NJF takes a look at the most exciting fixture in the UK tech calendar
2013 was an odd, in-between time for tech. Facebook had IPOed a year earlier, to slight disappointment, but it was not yet the regulatory hot potato accused of “stealing” the Clinton-Trump election or tipping the UK over the precipice of Brexit. The darling apps of investors were flash-in-the-pan Vine – bought by Twitter before launch in January 2013 – and Snapchat, while the hardware launches of the year were Microsoft’s Xbox One and its rival, Sony’s PlayStation 4. Certain issues that would become all the more salient in coming years were beginning to emerge: the massive tranche of documents leaked by Edward Snowden put privacy on the agenda of many tech conferences, and hackers had begun to target civilian infrastructure and businesses – including the American supermarket chain Target.
It was against this backdrop that another launch took place. London Tech Week’s first iteration (which actually took place in 2014) marked the first event of nine to date that have spotlighted London’s position as Europe’s tech capital – 590,000 people in the city work in the sector – and celebrated the thinkers and talent that will define the future. It has grown to host headline speakers including Sadiq Khan, Boris Johnson and Hillary Clinton, as well as policymakers, founders, stakeholders, CxOs and investors. 20,000 people now attend the week over five days, taking part in more than 60 events. It counts among its ambassadors the CEOs and founders of Microsoft UK, Founders Forum, Channel 4, Genomics England and the Royal Academy of Engineering (among others), as well as NJF Capital founder and investor Nicole Junkermann.
The 2023 edition of London Tech Week, which will take place in June at the Queen Elizabeth II conference centre in Westminster, is testament to the resilience of the capital’s tech sector. Since Brexit – the referendum on which took place literally halfway through London Tech Week in 2016 – there appear periodic pieces in newspapers and magazines predicting the end of London’s dominance within Europe as a centre of tech innovation. And yet, while leaving the EU has been painful in many sectors, tech continues to go from strength to strength: in 2021, for example, start-ups based in London raised $25.5 billion between them, the fourth-highest city for VC investment in the world. The only cities ahead of London were (perhaps predictably) San Francisco, New York and Boston.
Perched on the edge of the Atlantic, with a well-educated and English-speaking population, a good level of financial and legal regulation and appealing housing, services and other pulls, London remains an excellent city to sit between the USA and Europe. It’s both Anglophone and geographically European, and has a Prime Minister in Rishi Sunak who is keen to develop the Silicon Roundabout hub first promoted by his erstwhile predecessor David Cameron. Further east, the Olympic Park is home to Plexal, the tech park, where 800 start-up entrepreneurs are based, while Canary Wharf hosts one of Europe’s largest accelerators for fintech and cybersecurity, Level39. Google has spent £1bn to build a gargantuan headquarters in King’s Cross, and Apple commissioned British starchitect Norman Foster to design its new campus at the renovated Battersea Power Station.
In other words, London is still going strong, and while other cities like Berlin and Paris are also flourishing, it’s along the Thames that we’ll first witness many of the apps, hardware and innovation that will define the future. And, of course, in June at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre.