In recent years, the story told about London has been one of departure. Commentators talk about wealth leaving the capital, ambitious talent heading to rival hubs, and the city being in danger of losing the edge that once made it the natural place to build something big.
Lately, however, a different tone has started to appear online. People are celebrating London again, something the internet is calling ‘Londonmaxxing’. For founders, the sentiment is not new. London remains one of the world’s most attractive cities for ambitious people.
In the world I work in, advising investors and emerging companies, highly gifted founders from the UK and beyond are not asking whether London is still relevant. They are asking where the right talent sits, where serious capital is available, and where a company has the best chance of moving from idea to execution.
Again and again, London remains one of the strongest answers.
Part of that is the city itself. In addition to everything else the city has to offer, London still offers a density of capital, commercial opportunity and specialist advice that few places can match. A founder here is not operating in isolation.
They are surrounded by investors, advisers, corporate partners and potential customers, often within a few postcodes. For a young company trying to move quickly, that proximity matters. It saves time, speeds up decisions and makes it easier to turn conversations into real progress.
But London’s appeal becomes even clearer when you stop thinking about it as a standalone city and start thinking about it as the commercial heart of a wider corridor.
The Oxford-Cambridge-London triangle is one of the UK’s greatest strengths, and one of the reasons London continues to attract founders who could choose to set up shop almost anywhere in the world.
Oxford and Cambridge, together with London's own research universities like Imperial, UCL, King's College, Queen Mary and Brunel, bring extraordinary research depth, a production line of technical talent and experience of commercialising innovation.
London adds scale, visibility, market access and deeper pools of capital. Together, they create something far more powerful than three separate hubs operating in parallel.
You can see that especially clearly in the kinds of businesses now emerging from the corridor. This is not just a story about general tech optimism. It is about serious, research-led sectors where Britain genuinely has depth. AI is an obvious example, but so too are life sciences, healthtech, quantum, deeptech and data infrastructure. These are fields where brilliant science on its own is not enough. Founders need capital, commercialisation support and a network that understands how to turn complex ideas into scalable companies.
A founder building in AI or healthtech might draw on research talent from Cambridge or scientific expertise from Oxford, but London is where many of the relationships needed to scale still converge. It is where investors are found, where strategic partners are easier to reach, where media and international attention are more concentrated, and where the legal and financial architecture exists to help a company raise, structure and grow with confidence.
In my own work, where we advised on over 180 venture capital investment deals last year, many across this corridor, that pattern comes up repeatedly. The most interesting companies are often operating across the triangle in practice, even if they identify most closely with one city. The triangle works because it creates a flow of ideas, people and capital, and London benefits enormously from being the point where so much of that flow connects.
But none of that should make us complacent. If anything, the task now is to get better at converting this advantage into long-term staying power.
That means keeping the corridor open to international talent and resisting the temptation to make mobility harder at exactly the moment high-growth sectors need specialist people most. It means making sure capital pathways remain strong not just at seed stage, but later on too, so companies are not nudged elsewhere once they become more valuable.
It means ensuring the practical infrastructure of growth keeps up, from transport links across the corridor to the regulatory and market conditions that shape decisions on where a company lists, hires and expands.
It also means being more confident in telling this story. London does not need empty boosterism, but it does need a clearer sense of what makes it special. Its appeal to founders is not built on image alone. It is built on concentration, connectivity and the fact that it sits at the centre of one of the most important innovation corridors in Europe.
The opportunity now is to build on that, and make sure London becomes not just the obvious place to start, but the obvious place to stay.
Charlie Fletcher is a partner at Mishcon de Reya, specialising in M&A, corporate advisory, fundraising and international investment.
