Startups in Soho and Clerkenwell rival those in Shoreditch and the City
London startups are moving outside the Shoreditch bubble for their office space, new research has suggested, with Soho and Clerkenwell proving popular with tech firms just starting out.
The area known for Silicon Roundabout and Tech City remains the most popular place for startups, but online searches for office space suggest that the majority of businesses are looking for office space elsewhere in the capital.
Searches for startup office space were heavily weighted to east London, according to Hubble, the online office space rental marketplace. Its report is based on 150,000 searches on its website over the last year.
Data shared with City PM by Hubble indicates 51,000 of these searches – just over a third – were for office space in Shoreditch and the City.
Some 50,000 were for offices in the Clerkenwell and Soho areas – suggesting they rival the popularity of Tech City with startups.
After Shoreditch, the second most popular area was Soho. Just under a fifth of searches for startup office space were in this area, which includes Soho, Fitzrovia and Covent Garden.
Tushar Agarwal, chief executive and co-founder of Hubble, said "startup clusters" are beginning to appear across the city, and that locations that are both cheap and near other startups are particularly attractive.
Tom Watson, the company's chief technology officer and co-founder, added:
Startups benefit from being near one another as well as their customers and peers. Tech startups are generally not purely technology companies: they use technology to innovate across industries. It’s no surprise, then, that FinTech startups want to be in the City or Canary Wharf, design startups love Clerkenwell and media startups head to Soho.