Brighton wants to be London’s Silicon Valley
By Monty Munford From Mashable
The 7:47 a.m. train from Brighton to London is consistently packed full of commuters. And the 10 or so trains that precede it are equally stuffed.
The lucky ones score seats, and clack away on their tablets or smartphones, while the dilatory analogues stand resentfully, trying to turn the pages of their newspapers without jabbing somebody in the eye.
Twenty minutes later, as the train crosses a viaduct, the view opens to a glorious vista of the Sussex countryside. Everybody looks up briefly and absorbs the beauty, wishing he could get off the car and enjoy the fresh air. The poignancy is powerful.
It’s not uncommon for Londoners to move 50 miles south and an hour by train, to Brighton, on the coast. The natural beauty of the South Downs hills and seaside seem magnetic to those exhausted by London’s pace, its challenge to family life. The painful commute is tempered by lazy weekends, less crime and a laid-back, rhythmic lifestyle.
In the past two decades, this process has intensified. Those who made money from the London property boom found it could stretch a lot further in Brighton, and consequently, a Brighton property boom ensued. The exodus continues.
But while an influx of professionals piled in to Brighton, the town suffered a dearth of well-paid jobs for those who might eschew the daily London commute. Even 1997 government project Wired Sussex, which encouraged digital companies to cluster in Brighton, found it difficult without sufficient subsidies.
On becoming an independent organization 10 years later, however, Wired Sussex and Brighton’s entrepreneurial example has influenced a city transformation Brighton’s entrepreneurial example has influenced a city transformation, from an outlier that housed London expats to a standalone community and industry in its own right.
“We are increasingly seeing VCs and angel networks coming down to Brighton and being very upbeat about the quality of the companies they meet here,” says Phil Jones, the CEO of Wired Sussex. “It’s clear that Brighton as a digital hub is key to the future success of the city’s economy and a major provider of well-paid, sustainable jobs.”
In addition to full trains speeding off to London, Brighton is welcoming a swarm of commuters, as some Londoners prefer to live in the capital and work in Brighton. The model mirrors Silicon Valley and San Francisco; many highly-paid Google and Facebook employees, for example, reverse-commute from the city to more rural tech campuses.
Bryan Tookey, COO of social media monitoring company Brandwatch, not only commutes from North London, but also runs six miles home from the London terminal. Nothing like clearing your head and seeing a bit of London after a hard day’s work.
Brandwatch is a poster child of Brighton’s new local power. It has expanded gradually with offices in New York, Chicago, Stuttgart and Berlin. It is one of Brighton’s biggest digital employers, recently named on WorldBlu’s list of “Most Democratic Workplaces 2013.” Tookey’s boss and colleague, Giles Palmer, is the Brandwatch CEO.
“There aren’t many better places to start a technology business in the UK,” “There aren’t many better places to start a technology business in the UK,” says Palmer. “Firstly, there are two universities here, and Sussex in particular has a strong computer science department. Secondly, Brighton has an amazing culture of creativity, especially in digital media. And finally, it’s less than an hour to central London by train.”
For others, especially for bootstrapped startups, Brighton means an attractive and more economical place to do business. Oliver West is managing director of Minglur.com, a company that offers customers free conference calls with a reward scheme.
“There were only two options for the location of our offices,” says West. “Brighton or London. Brighton won without a fight for three simple reasons: There’s a plentiful supply of creative and technical talent; you don’t need a bank loan to pay the rent in a good location; and you’re not reliant on an overworked and underperforming transport system — your feet will do the job perfectly.”
Irish poet Brendan Behan once described Brighton, as police carted him away to Lewes prison 10 miles away, as “the beach at the end of the world.”
Walk along the promenade in the autumn. Flocks of starlings fly around the dilapidated West Pier. Hunker down with a pint of beer into a window seat at the seafront Fortune of War pub, and wait for a wash of melancholy to suffuse into your soul.
Brighton is an apt place to think, as well as to conduct business, but perhaps its so-called slower pace isn’t as different from London’s as it appears.
Jay Cooper, CEO and cofounder of BLOOM, didn’t establish his company in Brighton for peace and quiet. “As a Londoner, I actively chose to set up in Brighton and not London,” he says. “This wasn’t to find a gentler pace; on the contrary. I found that contemporaries in Brighton were making great use of the existing talent and support network to their advantage.”
It was another poet and writer, Samuel Johnson, who once said, “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.” But those words may not ring as true for those on the morning trains to London, who peer longingly from the viaduct and dream of different lives — ones that now pay very well, too.
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