London’s economy is booming but as a place to live it is simply unaffordable for many young people. So is the smart choice to move to one of the UK’s other thriving tech, culture and financial hubs? Guardian writers meet the people who have already made the leap

Before saying anything else about modern Britain, say this: it is utterly, desperately, drunkenly lopsided. Never mind talk of Scottish independence: Britons already live in two countries – London and the rest. In the years 2007 to 2011, when the UK was supposed to have been flattened by a financial cataclysm, the economy of London grew by a perfectly healthy 12.4% – just about double the rate of any other region. This is the danger with big cities. Talent and investment attract talent and investment, and before you know it some of the streets are so expensive that they might as well be paved with gold. Today, the average house in the capital costs half a million pounds – more than you could borrow on the prime minister’s salary.

For London’s partisans, this is a success story, and growth is obviously better than none, if that is the choice. However, there comes a point where for everyone to have more success, it needs to be spread around, and in the UK that point came years ago. Many talented young people face an impossible dilemma. In order to thrive in their chosen career, they often need to live in London, yet their chances of being able to buy a house there are between slim and hopeless. They must therefore choose either to abandon their dreams or impoverish themselves in later life by giving away most of what they earn as rent. This is terrible for them – and inefficient for the UK, since it forces people to be less productive and/or spend half their lives commuting.

The solution needs a better name, but for now it is called “regional hubs”. Despite talk of a “northern powerhouse”, no single conurbation is going to rival London soon, although some places are beginning to get a foothold in key areas. To some extent you can already see this happening in Cambridge and Brighton, where biotech and the creative industries are thriving. Neither city is exactly cheap to live in, and both count the journey time to London high among their assets, but they appear to be setting off chain reactions that have added Norwich to Cambridge, and have led other seaside towns such as Hastings and Margate to remake themselves as centres for the arts.

Sometimes one big move may be all it takes to trigger others. According to a report by KPMG, the BBC’s decision to take much of its work to Salford seems to be causing a wider “network effect” in creative and media businesses around Manchester. HSBC’s plan to move its retail division to Birmingham may yet accelerate the financial hub that is growing there. In other cases, the journey may be more gradual. There have been digital businesses around Bristol and Bath for years, but only recently has the map of them begun to look like a swarm. Something similar is happening in Edinburgh, springing largely from the university. It would have been unthinkable a decade ago, but for some young people now, in a whole host of different fields, it already looks as if the ambitious choice is to give London a miss.

Leo Benedictus

Edinburgh

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The city is small but is has such a huge momentum’ … Edinburgh. Photograph: John Lawson, Belhaven/Getty Images/Moment RF

Skyscanner HQ, Edinburgh. A cube forged in steel, glass and Foster and Partners chutzpah on the site of what used to be the city’s Royal Infirmary. Known as Quartermile, the area has become shorthand for young, moneyed Edinburgh and, in recent years, the city’s booming tech scene. Most of that is down to Skyscanner, launched in Edinburgh in 2001 and now the world’s second-biggest travel search engine with 700 employees globally (half of whom are based in this building) and 50 million unique monthly visitors. Only the rain-lashed views of the Castle and Old Town remind you that this is south Edinburgh, not Silicon Valley.

Past the reception desk (constructed from a reclaimed aeroplane wing, obviously), pool tables, coffee machines, beach huts and video-conferencing room kitted out with aeroplane seats, I arrive at Burj Al Arab, a room named after the famous Dubai hotel. Inside, I meet Sri-Sri Perangur, a 24-year-old data scientist, who relocated from London just a fortnight ago.

How is she finding it? “The city is small but it has such a huge momentum in tech,” she says. “If you like to work with huge volumes of numbers, this is where it’s at outside London. Edinburgh is the place to be for data science.” Despite having a population of just 500,000, Edinburgh is considered to have the largest technology cluster outside London in terms of productivity. Titans such as Amazon, Skyscanner and gamers Rockstar North are all based here. Edinburgh University’s School of Informatics, which has hothoused more than 60 startups in the past five years, is home to the biggest research group in the UK and one of the biggest in Europe.

“Not only is there growth, there is flexibility, openness, and lots of TED talks, meet-ups and hackathons, which I love,” Perangur says. “Skyscanner has a university where you can learn anything from code to making sushi. In London, I saw a lot of ego on the tech scene. The tech community here is very tightly knit but I also feel in touch with the world. There are more than 50 nationalities here. One of my team commutes from France.”

Perangur, originally from Bangalore, studied computer science at York University before moving to London. She worked in finance for two years then for a social network called State, a Silicon Valley startup that “employed 10 people from Google, Facebook, Stanford and Oxford” and was “very intense”. When she first heard of Skyscanner, she assumed it was in California. “I was surprised a booming startup like that wasn’t in Silicon Valley or London,” she admits. “Then I thought it was cool because they take real pride in being based in the north. If I had known about them, I probably wouldn’t have gone to London at all.”

Has life changed already? “My commute to work used to take up to two hours and now it’s a 30-minute walk through the city,” she says. “And the air is so clean and fresh, it’s like having a daily facial. My life is healthier. There’s an active climbing scene in Edinburgh, which is great because I’m really into bouldering. It turns out a lot of people in tech are – it must be something to do with the personality type.” Presumably there’s a bouldering course at Skyscanner University? “Actually,” she replies, “you have to go to the Glasgow office for that.”

Chitra Ramaswamy

Birmingham

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘When you actually come to Birmingham, you realise how nice it is’ … Thomas Hung Tran. Photograph: David Sillitoe/David Sillitoe for the Guardian

Thomas Hung Tran lived in Ho Chi Minh City, also known as Saigon, for the first 20 years of his life, but six months in London was plenty. “I do enjoy living in a big international city,” he says, “but not crowded and chaotic like London. The underground system was a problem, and also the affordability as well.” Tran stayed with a friend while he tried out the capital. In the three years since he left Vietnam to study accounting in Glasgow, he had got to know the UK a little, but felt he needed a taste of the famous city that PriceWaterhouseCoopers had just promised him a job in.

Perhaps because he had no roots in a particular part of Britain, perhaps because he is a good accountant, Tran, now 27, was able to appraise the situation coolly. “In the short term, it’s OK to rent a flat and live well in London,” he says. “But if you think about the long term, your career and also the family factor, it’s very difficult.” Glasgow he liked a lot, he says, but he bashfully admits he struggled with the accent. “So the first thing I did when I realised that London was not the right place to live, was to look for the second city.” He means this literally. “I went to Google and searched for the second city in the UK and what came up was Birmingham. Then when I did more research I found all these things.”

At the time, in 2012, Tran knew virtually nothing about Birmingham. He discovered that it was originally industrial, and therefore had canals. Depressingly, it was right next to the heart of an area called “the Black Country”. However, he also read about the exciting redesign for New Street station, about the HS2 rail link, and about the city’s own plans to redevelop Paradise Circus. “All these in combination began to ring a bell in my mind that something is interesting in Birmingham,” he says, “so why should I not move there?”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘A really good balance between the industrial and the living environment’ … Birmingham’s canal life. Photograph: Alamy

A visit sealed it. He especially remembers that huge canal system, which in fact “made a really good balance between the industrial and the living environment. When you actually come to Birmingham you realise that wow, it is actually so nice there!” Digging further, he found pleasant properties near the centre that he might, eventually, be able to afford, as well as an impressive selection of schools to educate the children that he one day hoped to have. Birmingham was also very deliberately trying to establish itself as a financial centre, recently with much success. In 2013, Deutsche Bank expanded its operations there, and earlier this year HSBC announced plans to move its retail banking HQ to the city.

Tran applied to transfer to PWC’s Birmingham office, and has worked there ever since. As it would turn out, his future wife, Trang Nguyen, was following the same lines of thought as she embarked on a marketing career. They have been married since April and live in the city centre, where they plan to stay.

Tran does not expect living in Birmingham to harm his career, simply because so much of his field is now global. Being on your clients’ doorstep is impossible, even in London. Besides, he says: “I actively enjoy living here. At the weekend, for example, I normally walk across the canal with my wife and then we visit the National Sea Life Centre, then go to the city centre, maybe go shopping.” After just three years he does not yet say this with a Brummie accent. Perhaps some children will one day help out there.

Leo Benedictus

Norwich

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘There is a lot of opportunity in Norwich for collaboration and multi-disciplinary work’ … Dr Brittany Hazard. Photograph: VisitBritain/Britain on View/Getty Images

When she tries to describe where Norwich is to friends back home in California, who have never heard of the city, Brittany Hazard says it’s in eastern England, “a city in the middle of a lot of agricultural areas. It seems like many people don’t pass through it to get anywhere.” There are the delights of Norfolk’s coast, of course, but she only moved to the city in September and hasn’t had the chance to do much exploring. She went to the seaside town of Cromer the other night, to volunteer at a careers evening at a school, but it was dark. “I know I was close to where the beach was. I’ve heard that there are seals there,” she says.

Hazard, 28, works as research fellow at the Institute of Food Research and the John Innes Centre, Norwich, and the city has long been on the map for her. For a community of researchers interested in plant genetics, Norwich is highly regarded around the world. At her previous university, Davis in California, Hazard was working on developing nutritional traits in wheat. When a job came up that would mean working at the John Innes Centre, which specialises in plant and crop genetic research, and the Institute of Food Research, both based at the Norwich Research Park – 230 hectares of parkland on the outskirts of the city, and home to a number of world-class research institutes and 3,000 scientists – she jumped at the chance.

“There is a lot of opportunity for collaboration and multi-disciplinary work,” Hazard says. “That’s one of the main reasons I came here. I was working in plant genetics but I really wanted to move that over into the health area and be able to do multi-disciplinary research and have the resources at the different institutes. It was the ideal position for me, creating that link between plant genetics and food and health.”

She is looking at ways of using conventional plant-breeding to develop new traits in wheat to improve human health, such as enhancing fibre content, and how altering the starch or carbohydrate structure can address obesity, diabetes and heart disease. “For the work I’m doing, the health and plant genetics aspects, this is really the best place to be. I think it would be hard to move somewhere else and still be able to have all those resources.”

She also loves Norwich, she says. “It’s a beautiful city, everybody is really friendly. Davis, where I was living in California, is more of a small university town but coming to Norwich, there are lots of restaurants, shops, and all the surrounding villages and countryside. It’s a great place to be.”

Emine Saner

Bristol

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I think women on engineering are encouraged here’ …Rula Arbash. Photograph: Adrian Sherratt/Adrian Sherratt for the Guardian

She has lived in the Middle East, Madrid and London, and speaks Arabic and Spanish, as well as English. But rather than finding a job in one of Europe’s great capitals, 28-year-old Rula Arbash has a challenging, rewarding, fun job and a great lifestyle in Bristol. “I love my job. I enjoy coming into work every single day,” she says. “There is so much going on within my industry here, so many chances to network, to develop, to further your career. Bristol is just wonderful.”

Arbash works for a company called Blu Wireless Technology, that designs the electronics that will power the next generation of wireless communication devices, enabling the transmission of video and other “big data” in seconds rather than minutes. As a junior front-end design engineer, Arbash designs some of the high-speed circuits that process the wireless data.

Originally from Jordan, Arbash studied electronics and communications engineering at Brunel University in London (named, of course, after the great 19th-century engineer Isambard Kindom Brunel, whose iconic Clifton suspension bridge soars across the Avon Gorge in Bristol) and completed a master’s at King’s College in mobile and personal communications and telecommunications engineering.

She then packed her bags and headed west. “I had heard about the great prospects for engineers here. It’s a big and growing field in Bristol. My attitude is that I will go wherever there is an opportunity. Bristol was a big opportunity.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘So many chances to further your career’ … Bristol. Photograph: Carolyn Eaton/Getty Images/Moment Open

Since the days of Brunel, Bristol has attracted brilliant engineers. Tech giants including HP, Toshiba IBM and aerospace specialists such as Airbus, Rolls-Royce and BAE Systems all have significant bases or laboratories in and around the city. A new wave of tech firms are also heading here, from Huawei, the Chinese telecoms giant, to Just Eat, the online takeaway service. And alongside the big names, scores of startups and medium-sized businesses are popping up.

International consultancy McKinsey recently identified the Bristol and Bath tech cluster as experiencing the fastest “internationally significant” growth outside London. For years marketing types have been trying to brand Bristol and the wider region as “Silicon Gorge”. It may, now, be justified.

“There are meetings, talks, conferences, chances to meet like-minded people,” says Arbash. “It is very exciting and stimulating.” But can she earn as much in Bristol as in London? “When I came to Bristol I didn’t even look at the salary but I think you can get the same wages here as in London, depending on your ambition and how the company sees you. And you can get better value for your money in Bristol compared with London. Good food, good people, great society.”

Arbash also says she is well-treated as a woman in what can still be a male-dominated sphere. “I work with lots of ladies. I think women in engineering are encouraged here.” She has joined the local branch of Toastmasters International, which promotes leadership and communication skills. Arbash also plays football in a mixed team in the annual Silicon Gorge football tournament.

Drawbacks to living and working in Bristol? There is, frankly, little chance of her beloved football team Real Madrid playing here in the near future – the two professional Bristol clubs are a little way off European football. And she is not overly impressed with the city’s transportation system compared with that in the capital. “Waiting for the No 73 bus for half an hour is not fun,” she says. “But apart from that, it’s great.”

Steven Morris

Sunderland

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘We’ve got a lot of young people who work for us’ … Lyle McCalmont, CEO of software company Leighton. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/Christopher Thomond for the Guardian





Leighton is a digital agency headquartered in Sunderland and Lyle McCalmont joined the company as a developer eight years ago, while in his 20s. Since then he has risen to the position of CEO.

Now 34, McCalmont graduated from his local university in Teeside with a degree in business computing and initially contemplated furthering his career in London. But when the role at Leighton came up, he jumped at the chance to move back to the north-east.

“I don’t know if I would have made the same speedy growth if I’d been in London,” he says. Leighton, relatively small when McCalmont joined, now employs around 85 staff.

McCalmont is just one success story in Sunderland’s thriving software sector. Sunderland Software City, a partnership between the public sector, private sector and the local university, was established in 2009 with the remit of making Sunderland the software hub of the UK. Much-needed infrastructure has been built – including at the business park where Leighton is based – to accommodate the needs of tech startups. More than a hundred have spawned from this base alone, and other big companies are now relocating to the area.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Quality of life is a key factor attracting people to Sunderland. Photograph: Neil Holmes/Getty Images

Ambitious plans are afoot to create thousands of new software jobs over the next five years, contributing £1bn to the regional economy. This masterplan was partly influenced by Paul Callaghan, co-founder of the Leighton Group. “We’ve got a lot of young people who work for us. There’s a really good feeling about the place,” McCalmont says. “I think people are starting to take the north-east far more seriously now in terms of what it can offer from a technology point of view. It’s cyclical, really – better people, better place to work, more graduates staying in the area, businesses relocating here because they can see how well it does – and so things just start to snowball.”

The wider north-east region hosts large IT firms such as Accenture, while Newcastle-based Sage is the only software company in the FTSE100. Sunderland-based Pitbull Studio became Epic Games UK last year following a long-standing collaboration. Epic is the video games giant behind the likes of Gears of War.

According to McCalmont, quality of life is also a key factor in attracting people to the north-east. “It’s got a lot of diversity. I like being by the sea [he lives in Redcar] and I’m very close to the North York Moors.”

Everyday factors add to the area’s appeal, with the relative ease of McCalmont’s morning commute and affordablity of housing all comparing favourably with life in London. “I do work in London now and again and I do visit the area, but I’m always pleased to come back home,” he says.

Dominic Smith

• This article was amended on 1 December 2015. An earlier version referred to Birmingham as “the heart of an area called ‘the Black Country’”. This has been corrected to say it was next to the area.

