Perhaps the North Has Been Comparing Itself to the Wrong Cities

There is a habit in British technology of measuring success against London. 

Funding announcements are judged by whether they rival the capital. Talent is discussed in terms of attracting people away from London. Even when regional ecosystems are celebrated, the compliment often arrives with an implicit caveat: impressive, for somewhere outside London. 

It is an understandable comparison. 

London remains one of the world’s great technology centres. It attracts extraordinary amounts of investment, hosts global venture capital firms and continues to produce companies that reshape industries. Every ambitious technology ecosystem should pay attention to what happens there. London accounts for the majority of UK venture capital, but innovation is growing faster in some other cities. 

But perhaps it is no longer the most useful comparison. 

The North of England is not trying to recreate London. Nor should it. 

Its economy has been built differently, its strengths are different and the opportunities ahead may depend on recognising those differences rather than apologising for them. 

A more revealing comparison might lie elsewhere in Europe. 

Comparisons with European regions such as Eindhoven, Helsinki, Munich and Gothenburg can be more revealing than comparisons with London. Eindhoven’s global reputation has been shaped by engineering, advanced manufacturing and a close relationship between industry and technical education. Helsinki, with a relatively small ecosystem, has consistently produced internationally recognised technology companies and a culture of entrepreneurship that extends well beyond individual successes. Munich has combined world-class engineering with deep corporate investment, while Gothenburg has become a centre for mobility, software and industrial innovation. 

None of these places compete with London on size. 

They compete on capability. 

That distinction matters. 

Technology ecosystems are often discussed as though scale alone determines success. Yet history suggests otherwise. Some of Europe’s most influential innovation centres are not the largest. They have become significant because they developed expertise in particular sectors, built strong relationships between universities and industry, and created environments where knowledge circulates between established companies, startups and investors. 

The North already possesses many of those characteristics. 

The North has several universities that perform strongly in Europe on engineering, computer science, medicine and materials research, and it has deep industrial capability. It is home to internationally recognised manufacturers, globally active professional services firms and growing communities of software businesses spread across multiple cities rather than concentrated in one. 

What it lacks is not substance. 

It is a shared narrative. 

For too long, Northern cities have tended to introduce themselves individually. Manchester tells its story. Leeds tells another. Sheffield, Liverpool and Newcastle do the same. Each has legitimate strengths and understandable ambitions. 

Viewed separately, they are respectable regional ecosystems. 

Viewed together, they begin to resemble something much more significant. 

Collectively, the North represents a large concentration of universities, technical talent, advanced manufacturing, health innovation and digital businesses by European standards. It possesses a scale that many European regions would recognise, yet it rarely presents itself that way. 

International investors often think in terms of regions rather than individual cities. 

An investor in New York or Singapore may be less focused on the distinctions between Manchester and Leeds than on whether the wider region offers enough talent, innovation, customers and ambition to justify investment. 

That perspective may become increasingly important. 

As technology becomes more specialised, ecosystems are likely to succeed by building networks rather than hierarchies. No single city can dominate every emerging industry. Artificial intelligence, health technology, climate technology, advanced manufacturing and quantum computing all require different expertise, different facilities and different partnerships. 

The regions that prosper will be those capable of connecting these strengths rather than concentrating them in one place. 

The North is unusually well placed to do exactly that. 

Its cities sit within relatively close proximity. Talent moves between them with increasing frequency. Universities collaborate more than they compete. Businesses recruit across regional boundaries. Supply chains rarely stop at administrative borders. 

In practice, the Northern technology economy already shows many characteristics of a network, with talent, businesses and supply chains moving across city boundaries, even if the public conversation still often treats each city separately. 

Its public conversation has simply been slower to catch up. 

Perhaps that is why comparisons with London increasingly feel incomplete. 

London is a global city. 

The North is something different: a distributed technology economy made up of complementary places, each contributing different capabilities to a larger whole. 

The better European comparisons may therefore be regions rather than capitals. Places where industrial heritage has evolved into technological expertise. Places where universities, businesses and civic institutions work together over decades rather than electoral cycles. Places that have become internationally respected not because they tried to imitate larger cities, but because they understood what made them distinctive. 

The North has reached a point where it should begin asking a different question. 

Not how it compares with London. 

But which European regions it now belongs alongside. 

The answer may reveal that the North has been underestimating itself for rather longer than anyone realised.