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London leads the field in e-location league
Even the archaic and unreliable transport network can't turn people away...

By Ron Coates

Published: Thursday 14 June 2001

London is the top e-location according to top worldwide commercial property consultants Healey & Baker.

And a London Chamber of Commerce & Industry survey found that ecommerce is concentrating in specific areas, rather than leading to dispersed work.

The Healey & Baker survey found London a long way ahead of Paris, Dublin and Amsterdam as the e-location of choice among the 201 ebusiness companies, split evenly between pure play and bricks-and-clicks enterprises.

James Weedon, spokesman for Healey & Baker, said: "We were surprised at how far on top London is. Another thing is that cost is not the most important issue; what counts is access to power, which we take for granted, bandwidth and the right skills and English-speakers.

"Oddly, the 170 non-UK respondents rated London's transport good. It's probably because of the access to airports and the US."

However, transport was still seen as London's big problem, according to the LCCI. Its report said the creaking transport system could jeopardise the city's status as a global business location. But it still expects commercial rents to increase by 12 per cent in the City and 8.5 per cent in the West End this year.

An LCCI spokesman said: "We found that ecommerce isn't moving out to some idyllic life in the country - it's concentrating in London. Of course the City is well-wired - there's lots of optical cable capacity."

US locations are still seen as the dominant ebusiness centers, taking seven of the top 11 slots. But Cambridge, in the UK, placed fourteenth, Thames Valley, sixteenth and Silicon Glen, twenty-first.