The City quietly gave up competing for regional bank headquarters and started winning something else instead

A Decade On, The City Is Still Here, Just Different

By Chelsea Bloom. Nearly ten years after the Brexit referendum, Bloomberg’s own retrospective analysis concludes what most people working in the Square Mile have quietly known for some time: the City of London has held onto both jobs and its overall economic contribution considerably more successfully than the gloomier post-referendum forecasts predicted. British policymakers who declared the business world could largely fend for itself during Brexit were, history now suggests, at least partly vindicated by how the City actually adapted.

What strikes me most, having covered this beat through the entire arc of that decade, is how the nature of London’s economic wins has genuinely shifted rather than simply persisted unchanged. The capital has, in effect, stopped competing for the prestige category of hosting regional bank headquarters, a battle continental rivals in Paris and Frankfurt have chased hard, and started winning a different, arguably more durable category of investment instead.

Where The Real Growth Is Actually Landing

Life sciences clusters around White City and the King’s Cross knowledge quarter have absorbed genuinely significant new American and Japanese tenants over the past eighteen months. Climate technology firms have established London bases specifically to access English contract law and the City’s deep pool of project finance specialists. Several large continental companies have chosen London, of all places, as their global creative and design office. None of this makes for the same triumphant headline as a bank relocating its European headquarters, but it represents projects anchored in specific, genuine local talent rather than the kind of tax arbitrage that can evaporate the moment a more favourable jurisdiction appears.

Further Reading

Full analysis is available via Bloomberg’s ten-year retrospective, with additional sector detail from London Loves Business.

A Quieter Story, But A More Durable One

The City that exists today is not the City that existed before the referendum, and pretending otherwise does nobody any favours. But a decade on, London has proven itself considerably more adaptable than either its harshest post-referendum critics or its most defensive boosters predicted, and that adaptability, quiet and undramatic as it often looks from the outside, may be the single most valuable asset the City actually has left standing.

SOURCE: https://prat.uk/