Nick Clegg joins clique of Meta bosses switching to London
https:/Yes, is back, part time…
Clegg is back, and London is back!
From that thread of articles:
"Hoberman said: “They also move because they see the US so fractionalised. As San Francisco loses its density [of tech headquarters], there’s a chance for London to be the global leader.”"
This is absolutely true. Why step over homeless addict in SF when you can be in glorious sunny London? In King's X? With no threat of Trump? And two hours from all of Europe?
I saw recently that parts of East London have taken over SF for density of tech startups. Kings cross looks like the choice for established tech so will be another huge draw for startups looking for global locations. I know one SAAS company which is currently HQ'd in SF that's considering moving operationally to London from there and leaving behind a small outpost of sales people in NYC. That's the other one that's coming for SF, operational excellence in development by being based in London and sales/GTM based on the East Coast of the US either in NYC or Miami. It's such a better set of timezones. SF used to have the advantage of crossover with APAC countries but with the ease of remote work and setting up remote workers on a single payroll tech companies are choosing to hire locally in Singapore, Melbourne and Wellington.
FPT
Yes, and more: as NYC sinks into crime, and is menaced by deeper political division, a lot of business in NYC will come here. Remote working suddenly benefits the UK
Really. Why would you work in NYC or LA or SF if you can work in London?
NYC is a truly great city and LA is jolly interesting and SF has a certain beauty, but they have grave downsides, and they are all trillions of miles from anywhere else
Fly two hours from NYC and you are in, er, Toronto
Compare that with London, when in 2 hours or less you can be in Paris, Venice, Berlin, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Rome, Florence, Edinburgh, Nice... and the Alps, the Balearics, Sicily, western Ireland, Burgundy, the Algarve, the Black Forest, the Dordogne, the Italian lakes, the Dolomites, Tyrol,...
There is no comparison. If your job is no longer quite so tied to the Silicon Valley office, you will move to London
NYC makes sense for a lot of reasons despite the crime (and it's nowhere near as bad as SF) it's got the 2pm-6pm crossover with London, there's already quite a few companies in the area, it's bigger and better connected than SF (which means people have the option of living in NJ and commuting in) and it's only 7h on a cheap business class flight from London for business meetings. For tech startups there's also a fuckton of potential clients on the doorstep in NYC because there's so many financial services companies looking to cut costs. The City is one of the reasons tech has thrived in London, its clients and financing for startups.
NYC is unquestionably a magnificent city (as I said in my earlier comment), but so is London. And the downsides of NYC - crime, racial tension, MAGA-Trump, divided country, healthcare, opiates, guns - now seem to me to outweigh the downsides of London: weather, greyness, grotty areas
Both are English-speaking world cities with glorious culture, London has more history, New York City has that skyline
The proximity of the rest of Europe might be the clincher for me, if I was a highly paid tech exec. And where do you want your kids to grow up? Safely?
But of course I am biased
I think we will see more American execs choosing London on a quasi-WFH basis. It will be a complex and remarkable irony if post-Brexit London ascends to world capital status (again?)..... because it is in Europe
Yes, that's why I think London is a good shout for operational and potentially tax HQ. My point on NYC is more in relation to having the sales function for NA run out of there rather than SF because it has significantly better crossover with London and it's only a 7h flight for when seniors and execs need face to face meetings.
The London/NYC split works brilliantly for financial services, it being replicated for tech would be no surprise.
The last piece of the puzzle is higher risk funds in London willing to invest hundreds of millions for series D onwards.
Yes, I concur
Finance/sales stuff might stay in NYC but a lot of intellectual/HQ heft will move to London
Add in the boost from Hong Kong and - perhaps unexpectedly - London could really thrive in the next decade
I wonder if this is what I sensed in King's X yesterday. Essentially they are - wittingly or not - creating a Silicon Valley in an amazing new London neighborhood, but with added universities and science institutes and art galleries and biochemistry labs and the British Library and the rest, and all of it 300m from St Pancras and the eurostar, and half an hour from Heathrow via the Liz Line, with Shoreditch and the Silicon roundabout just down the road
It is completely unique. London - esp King's X - has the chance to be THE tech hub for the world, or at least the western world
If I was the head of Instagram, I'd move from California to King's Cross (never thought I'd write that). Just to see
Kings Cross? Would you like to know about living there in the before times? Of COURSE you would...
I moved to that London in July 1999. I had graduated with a Journalism Degree in summer 1998 already working in radio on various short term contracts. By late spring 1999 there was a gap, and I was a bit fed up with the GF I was living with. So moved to London to find a job.
Which I did in 7 working days. Literally. Arrived Sunday. Agency interviews Monday, job interviews later that week, a 2nd interview the following Monday and started working for Nature the science journal straight away.
Their office is on Crinan Street, the north end of KX station with the canal basin behind. So I rented a 1 bed mini bedsit at the top of Grays Inn Road and started work. Kings Cross at the time was home to only one thriving industry - hookers. I was propositioned at 8am one morning crossing the road by the station on the way to work! There was so little in the way of facilities in Kings Cross that the company had a free canteen for its employees - there literally being nothing available in the vicinity.
At the top of Crinan Street was a pub which had been an old canal warehouse - now demolished and the site of Guardian Newspapers building. And a wine bar on Balfe Street. Aside from the Flying Scotsman fight bar on Caledonian Road, that was it.
The transformation in 20 years is literally mindblowing.
I remember that! Went to see someone in that office a few years earlier, perhaps 1992-3, when it was still very new. I did wince when I turned out of KX and saw the ambience of that street, and I was glad to be getting back to the train while it was still daylight.
In those days there was a ramp off the end of platform 1 out onto York Road. So you could exit the station, cross the street and be into the Nature building inside 30 seconds. Barely time to wave at Clive Sinclair in his penthouse...
I need to go back and explore the KX/StP area properly when I next visit my Camden friend; so much change there, including StP itself which was still very much its original state when I knew it, as described in Jack Simmons's history; didn't have time to more than pay homage to Hardy at the eponymous church, and to register the degree of change when passing through it in recent years, which needed a new edition of the history.
You can spend a whole day there, pretty much
Explore the new urbanism, check out the art galleries, see St Martin's, go to a movie or a play or a concert in one of the venues, have lunch or dinner (or both) in one of about 40 restaurants. Walk around Camley Street Wildpark, stroll along the Regent's Canal to Camden and Primrose Hill and back, go to the British Library, and more
All in that one district. Surrounded by industrial history Vs the new Google HQ. Fab
Mm, that's an idea - the canal walk in particular, especially as my chum lives in Camden.
This reminds me I got hold of this paper some years back for him - archaeological dig. No idea if it is of interest but he was very taken with it.
I had a little historical frisson yesterday. The HS2 guys are digging right outside my front door. I had a chat with one of them, a nice guy, and seriously Irish
And it occurred to me that this was a superb echo of when the very first railways were built, when Irish navvies would have worked in the exact same spot, then gone off to drink in the Dublin Castle (hence its name)
They would have worked by the houses in this famous print, middle right. One of these houses, as it happens, being the house where I now live
There's a quite good Melvin Bragg thing (possibly an In Our Time) about the first railways to come out of London. Broad arch of the story is that it was too expensive to roll them through the already posh parts, so they ploughed them through the slums. Middle-class people from the posh parts who could afford the newfangled trains were then exposed to the slums in ways they hadn't been before and lo-and-behold huge reforms began.
London's first ever passenger railway? Deptford to Spa Road (1836). Spa Road is closed, but Deptford still exists!
Nick Clegg joins clique of Meta bosses switching to London
https:/Yes, is back, part time…
Clegg is back, and London is back!
From that thread of articles:
"Hoberman said: “They also move because they see the US so fractionalised. As San Francisco loses its density [of tech headquarters], there’s a chance for London to be the global leader.”"
This is absolutely true. Why step over homeless addict in SF when you can be in glorious sunny London? In King's X? With no threat of Trump? And two hours from all of Europe?
I saw recently that parts of East London have taken over SF for density of tech startups. Kings cross looks like the choice for established tech so will be another huge draw for startups looking for global locations. I know one SAAS company which is currently HQ'd in SF that's considering moving operationally to London from there and leaving behind a small outpost of sales people in NYC. That's the other one that's coming for SF, operational excellence in development by being based in London and sales/GTM based on the East Coast of the US either in NYC or Miami. It's such a better set of timezones. SF used to have the advantage of crossover with APAC countries but with the ease of remote work and setting up remote workers on a single payroll tech companies are choosing to hire locally in Singapore, Melbourne and Wellington.
FPT
Yes, and more: as NYC sinks into crime, and is menaced by deeper political division, a lot of business in NYC will come here. Remote working suddenly benefits the UK
Really. Why would you work in NYC or LA or SF if you can work in London?
NYC is a truly great city and LA is jolly interesting and SF has a certain beauty, but they have grave downsides, and they are all trillions of miles from anywhere else
Fly two hours from NYC and you are in, er, Toronto
Compare that with London, when in 2 hours or less you can be in Paris, Venice, Berlin, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Rome, Florence, Edinburgh, Nice... and the Alps, the Balearics, Sicily, western Ireland, Burgundy, the Algarve, the Black Forest, the Dordogne, the Italian lakes, the Dolomites, Tyrol,...
There is no comparison. If your job is no longer quite so tied to the Silicon Valley office, you will move to London
NYC makes sense for a lot of reasons despite the crime (and it's nowhere near as bad as SF) it's got the 2pm-6pm crossover with London, there's already quite a few companies in the area, it's bigger and better connected than SF (which means people have the option of living in NJ and commuting in) and it's only 7h on a cheap business class flight from London for business meetings. For tech startups there's also a fuckton of potential clients on the doorstep in NYC because there's so many financial services companies looking to cut costs. The City is one of the reasons tech has thrived in London, its clients and financing for startups.
NYC is unquestionably a magnificent city (as I said in my earlier comment), but so is London. And the downsides of NYC - crime, racial tension, MAGA-Trump, divided country, healthcare, opiates, guns - now seem to me to outweigh the downsides of London: weather, greyness, grotty areas
Both are English-speaking world cities with glorious culture, London has more history, New York City has that skyline
The proximity of the rest of Europe might be the clincher for me, if I was a highly paid tech exec. And where do you want your kids to grow up? Safely?
But of course I am biased
I think we will see more American execs choosing London on a quasi-WFH basis. It will be a complex and remarkable irony if post-Brexit London ascends to world capital status (again?)..... because it is in Europe
Yes, that's why I think London is a good shout for operational and potentially tax HQ. My point on NYC is more in relation to having the sales function for NA run out of there rather than SF because it has significantly better crossover with London and it's only a 7h flight for when seniors and execs need face to face meetings.
The London/NYC split works brilliantly for financial services, it being replicated for tech would be no surprise.
The last piece of the puzzle is higher risk funds in London willing to invest hundreds of millions for series D onwards.
Yes, I concur
Finance/sales stuff might stay in NYC but a lot of intellectual/HQ heft will move to London
Add in the boost from Hong Kong and - perhaps unexpectedly - London could really thrive in the next decade
I wonder if this is what I sensed in King's X yesterday. Essentially they are - wittingly or not - creating a Silicon Valley in an amazing new London neighborhood, but with added universities and science institutes and art galleries and biochemistry labs and the British Library and the rest, and all of it 300m from St Pancras and the eurostar, and half an hour from Heathrow via the Liz Line, with Shoreditch and the Silicon roundabout just down the road
It is completely unique. London - esp King's X - has the chance to be THE tech hub for the world, or at least the western world
If I was the head of Instagram, I'd move from California to King's Cross (never thought I'd write that). Just to see
Kings Cross? Would you like to know about living there in the before times? Of COURSE you would...
I moved to that London in July 1999. I had graduated with a Journalism Degree in summer 1998 already working in radio on various short term contracts. By late spring 1999 there was a gap, and I was a bit fed up with the GF I was living with. So moved to London to find a job.
Which I did in 7 working days. Literally. Arrived Sunday. Agency interviews Monday, job interviews later that week, a 2nd interview the following Monday and started working for Nature the science journal straight away.
Their office is on Crinan Street, the north end of KX station with the canal basin behind. So I rented a 1 bed mini bedsit at the top of Grays Inn Road and started work. Kings Cross at the time was home to only one thriving industry - hookers. I was propositioned at 8am one morning crossing the road by the station on the way to work! There was so little in the way of facilities in Kings Cross that the company had a free canteen for its employees - there literally being nothing available in the vicinity.
At the top of Crinan Street was a pub which had been an old canal warehouse - now demolished and the site of Guardian Newspapers building. And a wine bar on Balfe Street. Aside from the Flying Scotsman fight bar on Caledonian Road, that was it.
The transformation in 20 years is literally mindblowing.
I remember that! Went to see someone in that office a few years earlier, perhaps 1992-3, when it was still very new. I did wince when I turned out of KX and saw the ambience of that street, and I was glad to be getting back to the train while it was still daylight.
In those days there was a ramp off the end of platform 1 out onto York Road. So you could exit the station, cross the street and be into the Nature building inside 30 seconds. Barely time to wave at Clive Sinclair in his penthouse...
I need to go back and explore the KX/StP area properly when I next visit my Camden friend; so much change there, including StP itself which was still very much its original state when I knew it, as described in Jack Simmons's history; didn't have time to more than pay homage to Hardy at the eponymous church, and to register the degree of change when passing through it in recent years, which needed a new edition of the history.
You can spend a whole day there, pretty much
Explore the new urbanism, check out the art galleries, see St Martin's, go to a movie or a play or a concert in one of the venues, have lunch or dinner (or both) in one of about 40 restaurants. Walk around Camley Street Wildpark, stroll along the Regent's Canal to Camden and Primrose Hill and back, go to the British Library, and more
All in that one district. Surrounded by industrial history Vs the new Google HQ. Fab
Mm, that's an idea - the canal walk in particular, especially as my chum lives in Camden.
This reminds me I got hold of this paper some years back for him - archaeological dig. No idea if it is of interest but he was very taken with it.
I had a little historical frisson yesterday. The HS2 guys are digging right outside my front door. I had a chat with one of them, a nice guy, and seriously Irish
And it occurred to me that this was a superb echo of when the very first railways were built, when Irish navvies would have worked in the exact same spot, then gone off to drink in the Dublin Castle (hence its name)
They would have worked by the houses in this famous print, middle right. One of these houses, as it happens, being the house where I now live
There's a quite good Melvin Bragg thing (possibly an In Our Time) about the first railways to come out of London. Broad arch of the story is that it was too expensive to roll them through the already posh parts, so they ploughed them through the slums. Middle-class people from the posh parts who could afford the newfangled trains were then exposed to the slums in ways they hadn't been before and lo-and-behold huge reforms began.
You got me looking for that In Our Time railway episode, which sounds fascinating.
I haven't found it (yet) but there are a mind-blowing 959 IOT episodes! Of which I've listened to about a dozen.
You have sorted out my podcast listening for the next few months. Thanks!
ISTR there's one where one of the panelists accuses Bragg of racism! I think it was something about the industrial revolution. To their credit, they kept it in.
The village supermarket's petrol station got water into its fuel today, meaning many cars broke down. There are allegations it was known about last night, but the morning shift opened up as usual...
An expensive problem for Mozzies.
"Mozzies" ?
Morrisons, the supermarket. A local lady in her 80s, very RP, called it 'Mozzies' like she's a yoof, and I decided to call it the same.
10k is a distance I can imagine actually running (obviously no where near as fast) and is long enough for a narrative to develop - to feel the psychology of the participants. The marathon, on the other hand, is incomprehensible to me. I couldn't imagine doing a marathon at anything above a walk.
'LIZ Truss’s campaign team has backtracked on the leadership hopeful’s claim that she’ll “ignore” Nicola Sturgeon after it sparked outrage among Scottish Tories and across the political spectrum.'
(and remember Ms Truss had said that 'what we need to do is show the people of Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales what we are delivering for them, and making sure that all of our government policies apply right across the United Kingdom.' Which means the abolition of devolution, and direct rule in NI, on one reading - it does not make sense otherwise. And is a rather silly mistake, which surprises me. Unless it was deliberate raw meat for the Tory oldies. )
However Truss still correctly makes clear she will not allow an indyref2
As one of us said last night, don't you have a nice recording on side B that you could use just sometimes?
How about this? Some nice Deltic noises (appropriate for the KX parallel discussion of course).
Pah. Deltics. Over-rated rubbish. Like racehorses, they lasted only twenty years before they were sent to the knacker's yard.
Some Class 37's are still going 60 years later without seeing the glue factory.
Though, when they re-engined a German E-boat with Deltics, it became faster, longer range and more reliable.
Better than the legendary E Boat diesels…
This is from memory, but ISTR reading that the problem is the engine cycle. On a boat, you run at a set power for very long periods, frequently hours - and as the Deltics were originally marine engines, that was what they were designed for. Loco engines have frequent power changes every few minutes, and this played havoc with them. The same with the original HST Ventura engines, where (I think) the frequent power changes would pull oil into the exhausts. If enough built up, you got an exhaust fire. It was also partly responsible for the famous clag when an HST started off.
Both the Deltic and Ventura were developments of engines designed for the Admiralty.
At the pre war conference when the Americans standardised on the fleet subs, the point was made that a diesel electric boat always driven off the electric motors had the advantage that for sudden acceleration, you upped the battery drain, while bringing the diesels up to power more slowly….
10k is a distance I can imagine actually running (obviously no where near as fast) and is long enough for a narrative to develop - to feel the psychology of the participants. The marathon, on the other hand, is incomprehensible to me. I couldn't imagine doing a marathon at anything above a walk.
Conversely i have run 3 but couldn't bear the thought of walking that distance.
There must be some massive market for superhero and comic book films - which are essentially all the same - that just totally passes me by.
It seems dozens are released a year, and they must be popular, yet I haven't seen a single one and have no intention to.
Done right many of the best action movies are comic ones, though certainly the genre can contain its fair share of duds. So the real question surely is whether you like action movies or not? To say they're all essentially the same is like saying that Die Hard is the same as Highlander 2: The Quickening.
3 related reasons why superhero movies work so well:
1: A lot of movies are based on literature, and there's a wealth of stories written over the past 70-odd years of comics to base movies upon.
2: A wealth of fleshed out characters to build stories with.
3: A good action movie really needs a good villain. Die Hard without Hans Gruber would not be the same thing. In the past Hollywood might typically cast the British, Germans or Russians as a villain in a lot of films, but nowadays they are so politically correct that they try to avoid casting anyone as a villain that might offend markets they want to launch the product in. So real-world based movies have become increasingly bizarre at finding good villains. Corrupt businessmen seems to be the go-to nowadays which is hardly fun, or more realistic.
The last is possibly the most important. Comics have not just heroes, but possibly even more importantly a rich tapestry of a rogue's gallery to work with. Hollywood won't make a movie with the Chinese as villains, but with Thanos there's no need to hold back.
This season's gimmick on The Hundred seems to be interviewing a fielder mid play. He's got a mic and an earpiece attached and occasionally has to run towards the ball mid answer.
There must be some massive market for superhero and comic book films - which are essentially all the same - that just totally passes me by.
It seems dozens are released a year, and they must be popular, yet I haven't seen a single one and have no intention to.
It helps that they are not all essentially the same.
Certainly many are formulaic - so are Pixar films, though the general quality is higher with those - and are marketed very similarly, but The Batman is nothing like X-Men 2 which is nothing like Thor: Love and Thunder, which itself is actually very little like the first Thor movie despite having the same lead and being in the same universe. The first Thor was playing everything very straight and comparitively understated in its action set pieces. The last one was an out and out comedy film with intentionally over the top visuals all the way through - one was about the lead finding humanity, the last all about cosmic deities (but for a subplot) .
'Comic book movies' are not really a genre, despite widespread reference to such. Some are more like spy thrillers, others are dark detective stories, others are pure comedic silliness, some have a moral message, and the quality is all over the place.
Nick Clegg joins clique of Meta bosses switching to London
https:/Yes, is back, part time…
Clegg is back, and London is back!
From that thread of articles:
"Hoberman said: “They also move because they see the US so fractionalised. As San Francisco loses its density [of tech headquarters], there’s a chance for London to be the global leader.”"
This is absolutely true. Why step over homeless addict in SF when you can be in glorious sunny London? In King's X? With no threat of Trump? And two hours from all of Europe?
I saw recently that parts of East London have taken over SF for density of tech startups. Kings cross looks like the choice for established tech so will be another huge draw for startups looking for global locations. I know one SAAS company which is currently HQ'd in SF that's considering moving operationally to London from there and leaving behind a small outpost of sales people in NYC. That's the other one that's coming for SF, operational excellence in development by being based in London and sales/GTM based on the East Coast of the US either in NYC or Miami. It's such a better set of timezones. SF used to have the advantage of crossover with APAC countries but with the ease of remote work and setting up remote workers on a single payroll tech companies are choosing to hire locally in Singapore, Melbourne and Wellington.
FPT
Yes, and more: as NYC sinks into crime, and is menaced by deeper political division, a lot of business in NYC will come here. Remote working suddenly benefits the UK
Really. Why would you work in NYC or LA or SF if you can work in London?
NYC is a truly great city and LA is jolly interesting and SF has a certain beauty, but they have grave downsides, and they are all trillions of miles from anywhere else
Fly two hours from NYC and you are in, er, Toronto
Compare that with London, when in 2 hours or less you can be in Paris, Venice, Berlin, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Rome, Florence, Edinburgh, Nice... and the Alps, the Balearics, Sicily, western Ireland, Burgundy, the Algarve, the Black Forest, the Dordogne, the Italian lakes, the Dolomites, Tyrol,...
There is no comparison. If your job is no longer quite so tied to the Silicon Valley office, you will move to London
NYC makes sense for a lot of reasons despite the crime (and it's nowhere near as bad as SF) it's got the 2pm-6pm crossover with London, there's already quite a few companies in the area, it's bigger and better connected than SF (which means people have the option of living in NJ and commuting in) and it's only 7h on a cheap business class flight from London for business meetings. For tech startups there's also a fuckton of potential clients on the doorstep in NYC because there's so many financial services companies looking to cut costs. The City is one of the reasons tech has thrived in London, its clients and financing for startups.
NYC is unquestionably a magnificent city (as I said in my earlier comment), but so is London. And the downsides of NYC - crime, racial tension, MAGA-Trump, divided country, healthcare, opiates, guns - now seem to me to outweigh the downsides of London: weather, greyness, grotty areas
Both are English-speaking world cities with glorious culture, London has more history, New York City has that skyline
The proximity of the rest of Europe might be the clincher for me, if I was a highly paid tech exec. And where do you want your kids to grow up? Safely?
But of course I am biased
I think we will see more American execs choosing London on a quasi-WFH basis. It will be a complex and remarkable irony if post-Brexit London ascends to world capital status (again?)..... because it is in Europe
Yes, that's why I think London is a good shout for operational and potentially tax HQ. My point on NYC is more in relation to having the sales function for NA run out of there rather than SF because it has significantly better crossover with London and it's only a 7h flight for when seniors and execs need face to face meetings.
The London/NYC split works brilliantly for financial services, it being replicated for tech would be no surprise.
The last piece of the puzzle is higher risk funds in London willing to invest hundreds of millions for series D onwards.
Yes, I concur
Finance/sales stuff might stay in NYC but a lot of intellectual/HQ heft will move to London
Add in the boost from Hong Kong and - perhaps unexpectedly - London could really thrive in the next decade
I wonder if this is what I sensed in King's X yesterday. Essentially they are - wittingly or not - creating a Silicon Valley in an amazing new London neighborhood, but with added universities and science institutes and art galleries and biochemistry labs and the British Library and the rest, and all of it 300m from St Pancras and the eurostar, and half an hour from Heathrow via the Liz Line, with Shoreditch and the Silicon roundabout just down the road
It is completely unique. London - esp King's X - has the chance to be THE tech hub for the world, or at least the western world
If I was the head of Instagram, I'd move from California to King's Cross (never thought I'd write that). Just to see
Kings Cross? Would you like to know about living there in the before times? Of COURSE you would...
I moved to that London in July 1999. I had graduated with a Journalism Degree in summer 1998 already working in radio on various short term contracts. By late spring 1999 there was a gap, and I was a bit fed up with the GF I was living with. So moved to London to find a job.
Which I did in 7 working days. Literally. Arrived Sunday. Agency interviews Monday, job interviews later that week, a 2nd interview the following Monday and started working for Nature the science journal straight away.
Their office is on Crinan Street, the north end of KX station with the canal basin behind. So I rented a 1 bed mini bedsit at the top of Grays Inn Road and started work. Kings Cross at the time was home to only one thriving industry - hookers. I was propositioned at 8am one morning crossing the road by the station on the way to work! There was so little in the way of facilities in Kings Cross that the company had a free canteen for its employees - there literally being nothing available in the vicinity.
At the top of Crinan Street was a pub which had been an old canal warehouse - now demolished and the site of Guardian Newspapers building. And a wine bar on Balfe Street. Aside from the Flying Scotsman fight bar on Caledonian Road, that was it.
The transformation in 20 years is literally mindblowing.
I remember that! Went to see someone in that office a few years earlier, perhaps 1992-3, when it was still very new. I did wince when I turned out of KX and saw the ambience of that street, and I was glad to be getting back to the train while it was still daylight.
In those days there was a ramp off the end of platform 1 out onto York Road. So you could exit the station, cross the street and be into the Nature building inside 30 seconds. Barely time to wave at Clive Sinclair in his penthouse...
I need to go back and explore the KX/StP area properly when I next visit my Camden friend; so much change there, including StP itself which was still very much its original state when I knew it, as described in Jack Simmons's history; didn't have time to more than pay homage to Hardy at the eponymous church, and to register the degree of change when passing through it in recent years, which needed a new edition of the history.
You can spend a whole day there, pretty much
Explore the new urbanism, check out the art galleries, see St Martin's, go to a movie or a play or a concert in one of the venues, have lunch or dinner (or both) in one of about 40 restaurants. Walk around Camley Street Wildpark, stroll along the Regent's Canal to Camden and Primrose Hill and back, go to the British Library, and more
All in that one district. Surrounded by industrial history Vs the new Google HQ. Fab
Mm, that's an idea - the canal walk in particular, especially as my chum lives in Camden.
This reminds me I got hold of this paper some years back for him - archaeological dig. No idea if it is of interest but he was very taken with it.
I had a little historical frisson yesterday. The HS2 guys are digging right outside my front door. I had a chat with one of them, a nice guy, and seriously Irish
And it occurred to me that this was a superb echo of when the very first railways were built, when Irish navvies would have worked in the exact same spot, then gone off to drink in the Dublin Castle (hence its name)
They would have worked by the houses in this famous print, middle right. One of these houses, as it happens, being the house where I now live
There's a quite good Melvin Bragg thing (possibly an In Our Time) about the first railways to come out of London. Broad arch of the story is that it was too expensive to roll them through the already posh parts, so they ploughed them through the slums. Middle-class people from the posh parts who could afford the newfangled trains were then exposed to the slums in ways they hadn't been before and lo-and-behold huge reforms began.
You got me looking for that In Our Time railway episode, which sounds fascinating.
I haven't found it (yet) but there are a mind-blowing 959 IOT episodes! Of which I've listened to about a dozen.
You have sorted out my podcast listening for the next few months. Thanks!
IOT is truly a great series of interesting (depending on taste of course) podcasts. Ran into it about a month or so ago, and it's now my preferred bedtime listening.
Certainly compared to Alex Jones OR the My Pillow Putschist.
Just lost the debate on Sky News, searched around and wondered whether it was on GBNews. Dan Wooton claimed "no spin, no bias" before introducing industrial scale spin and bias.
No debate, but then it had been very dreary. Much happier flicking between by the Hundred and the Commonwealth Games, both on what Dan Wooton had called the "Britain Bashing Corporation".
Nick Clegg joins clique of Meta bosses switching to London
https:/Yes, is back, part time…
Clegg is back, and London is back!
From that thread of articles:
"Hoberman said: “They also move because they see the US so fractionalised. As San Francisco loses its density [of tech headquarters], there’s a chance for London to be the global leader.”"
This is absolutely true. Why step over homeless addict in SF when you can be in glorious sunny London? In King's X? With no threat of Trump? And two hours from all of Europe?
I saw recently that parts of East London have taken over SF for density of tech startups. Kings cross looks like the choice for established tech so will be another huge draw for startups looking for global locations. I know one SAAS company which is currently HQ'd in SF that's considering moving operationally to London from there and leaving behind a small outpost of sales people in NYC. That's the other one that's coming for SF, operational excellence in development by being based in London and sales/GTM based on the East Coast of the US either in NYC or Miami. It's such a better set of timezones. SF used to have the advantage of crossover with APAC countries but with the ease of remote work and setting up remote workers on a single payroll tech companies are choosing to hire locally in Singapore, Melbourne and Wellington.
FPT
Yes, and more: as NYC sinks into crime, and is menaced by deeper political division, a lot of business in NYC will come here. Remote working suddenly benefits the UK
Really. Why would you work in NYC or LA or SF if you can work in London?
NYC is a truly great city and LA is jolly interesting and SF has a certain beauty, but they have grave downsides, and they are all trillions of miles from anywhere else
Fly two hours from NYC and you are in, er, Toronto
Compare that with London, when in 2 hours or less you can be in Paris, Venice, Berlin, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Rome, Florence, Edinburgh, Nice... and the Alps, the Balearics, Sicily, western Ireland, Burgundy, the Algarve, the Black Forest, the Dordogne, the Italian lakes, the Dolomites, Tyrol,...
There is no comparison. If your job is no longer quite so tied to the Silicon Valley office, you will move to London
NYC makes sense for a lot of reasons despite the crime (and it's nowhere near as bad as SF) it's got the 2pm-6pm crossover with London, there's already quite a few companies in the area, it's bigger and better connected than SF (which means people have the option of living in NJ and commuting in) and it's only 7h on a cheap business class flight from London for business meetings. For tech startups there's also a fuckton of potential clients on the doorstep in NYC because there's so many financial services companies looking to cut costs. The City is one of the reasons tech has thrived in London, its clients and financing for startups.
NYC is unquestionably a magnificent city (as I said in my earlier comment), but so is London. And the downsides of NYC - crime, racial tension, MAGA-Trump, divided country, healthcare, opiates, guns - now seem to me to outweigh the downsides of London: weather, greyness, grotty areas
Both are English-speaking world cities with glorious culture, London has more history, New York City has that skyline
The proximity of the rest of Europe might be the clincher for me, if I was a highly paid tech exec. And where do you want your kids to grow up? Safely?
But of course I am biased
I think we will see more American execs choosing London on a quasi-WFH basis. It will be a complex and remarkable irony if post-Brexit London ascends to world capital status (again?)..... because it is in Europe
Yes, that's why I think London is a good shout for operational and potentially tax HQ. My point on NYC is more in relation to having the sales function for NA run out of there rather than SF because it has significantly better crossover with London and it's only a 7h flight for when seniors and execs need face to face meetings.
The London/NYC split works brilliantly for financial services, it being replicated for tech would be no surprise.
The last piece of the puzzle is higher risk funds in London willing to invest hundreds of millions for series D onwards.
Yes, I concur
Finance/sales stuff might stay in NYC but a lot of intellectual/HQ heft will move to London
Add in the boost from Hong Kong and - perhaps unexpectedly - London could really thrive in the next decade
I wonder if this is what I sensed in King's X yesterday. Essentially they are - wittingly or not - creating a Silicon Valley in an amazing new London neighborhood, but with added universities and science institutes and art galleries and biochemistry labs and the British Library and the rest, and all of it 300m from St Pancras and the eurostar, and half an hour from Heathrow via the Liz Line, with Shoreditch and the Silicon roundabout just down the road
It is completely unique. London - esp King's X - has the chance to be THE tech hub for the world, or at least the western world
If I was the head of Instagram, I'd move from California to King's Cross (never thought I'd write that). Just to see
Kings Cross? Would you like to know about living there in the before times? Of COURSE you would...
I moved to that London in July 1999. I had graduated with a Journalism Degree in summer 1998 already working in radio on various short term contracts. By late spring 1999 there was a gap, and I was a bit fed up with the GF I was living with. So moved to London to find a job.
Which I did in 7 working days. Literally. Arrived Sunday. Agency interviews Monday, job interviews later that week, a 2nd interview the following Monday and started working for Nature the science journal straight away.
Their office is on Crinan Street, the north end of KX station with the canal basin behind. So I rented a 1 bed mini bedsit at the top of Grays Inn Road and started work. Kings Cross at the time was home to only one thriving industry - hookers. I was propositioned at 8am one morning crossing the road by the station on the way to work! There was so little in the way of facilities in Kings Cross that the company had a free canteen for its employees - there literally being nothing available in the vicinity.
At the top of Crinan Street was a pub which had been an old canal warehouse - now demolished and the site of Guardian Newspapers building. And a wine bar on Balfe Street. Aside from the Flying Scotsman fight bar on Caledonian Road, that was it.
The transformation in 20 years is literally mindblowing.
I remember that! Went to see someone in that office a few years earlier, perhaps 1992-3, when it was still very new. I did wince when I turned out of KX and saw the ambience of that street, and I was glad to be getting back to the train while it was still daylight.
In those days there was a ramp off the end of platform 1 out onto York Road. So you could exit the station, cross the street and be into the Nature building inside 30 seconds. Barely time to wave at Clive Sinclair in his penthouse...
I need to go back and explore the KX/StP area properly when I next visit my Camden friend; so much change there, including StP itself which was still very much its original state when I knew it, as described in Jack Simmons's history; didn't have time to more than pay homage to Hardy at the eponymous church, and to register the degree of change when passing through it in recent years, which needed a new edition of the history.
You can spend a whole day there, pretty much
Explore the new urbanism, check out the art galleries, see St Martin's, go to a movie or a play or a concert in one of the venues, have lunch or dinner (or both) in one of about 40 restaurants. Walk around Camley Street Wildpark, stroll along the Regent's Canal to Camden and Primrose Hill and back, go to the British Library, and more
All in that one district. Surrounded by industrial history Vs the new Google HQ. Fab
Mm, that's an idea - the canal walk in particular, especially as my chum lives in Camden.
This reminds me I got hold of this paper some years back for him - archaeological dig. No idea if it is of interest but he was very taken with it.
I had a little historical frisson yesterday. The HS2 guys are digging right outside my front door. I had a chat with one of them, a nice guy, and seriously Irish
And it occurred to me that this was a superb echo of when the very first railways were built, when Irish navvies would have worked in the exact same spot, then gone off to drink in the Dublin Castle (hence its name)
They would have worked by the houses in this famous print, middle right. One of these houses, as it happens, being the house where I now live
There's a quite good Melvin Bragg thing (possibly an In Our Time) about the first railways to come out of London. Broad arch of the story is that it was too expensive to roll them through the already posh parts, so they ploughed them through the slums. Middle-class people from the posh parts who could afford the newfangled trains were then exposed to the slums in ways they hadn't been before and lo-and-behold huge reforms began.
You got me looking for that In Our Time railway episode, which sounds fascinating.
I haven't found it (yet) but there are a mind-blowing 959 IOT episodes! Of which I've listened to about a dozen.
You have sorted out my podcast listening for the next few months. Thanks!
It's a remarkable series. One of the gems of BBC radio.
Nick Clegg joins clique of Meta bosses switching to London
https:/Yes, is back, part time…
Clegg is back, and London is back!
From that thread of articles:
"Hoberman said: “They also move because they see the US so fractionalised. As San Francisco loses its density [of tech headquarters], there’s a chance for London to be the global leader.”"
This is absolutely true. Why step over homeless addict in SF when you can be in glorious sunny London? In King's X? With no threat of Trump? And two hours from all of Europe?
I saw recently that parts of East London have taken over SF for density of tech startups. Kings cross looks like the choice for established tech so will be another huge draw for startups looking for global locations. I know one SAAS company which is currently HQ'd in SF that's considering moving operationally to London from there and leaving behind a small outpost of sales people in NYC. That's the other one that's coming for SF, operational excellence in development by being based in London and sales/GTM based on the East Coast of the US either in NYC or Miami. It's such a better set of timezones. SF used to have the advantage of crossover with APAC countries but with the ease of remote work and setting up remote workers on a single payroll tech companies are choosing to hire locally in Singapore, Melbourne and Wellington.
FPT
Yes, and more: as NYC sinks into crime, and is menaced by deeper political division, a lot of business in NYC will come here. Remote working suddenly benefits the UK
Really. Why would you work in NYC or LA or SF if you can work in London?
NYC is a truly great city and LA is jolly interesting and SF has a certain beauty, but they have grave downsides, and they are all trillions of miles from anywhere else
Fly two hours from NYC and you are in, er, Toronto
Compare that with London, when in 2 hours or less you can be in Paris, Venice, Berlin, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Rome, Florence, Edinburgh, Nice... and the Alps, the Balearics, Sicily, western Ireland, Burgundy, the Algarve, the Black Forest, the Dordogne, the Italian lakes, the Dolomites, Tyrol,...
There is no comparison. If your job is no longer quite so tied to the Silicon Valley office, you will move to London
NYC makes sense for a lot of reasons despite the crime (and it's nowhere near as bad as SF) it's got the 2pm-6pm crossover with London, there's already quite a few companies in the area, it's bigger and better connected than SF (which means people have the option of living in NJ and commuting in) and it's only 7h on a cheap business class flight from London for business meetings. For tech startups there's also a fuckton of potential clients on the doorstep in NYC because there's so many financial services companies looking to cut costs. The City is one of the reasons tech has thrived in London, its clients and financing for startups.
NYC is unquestionably a magnificent city (as I said in my earlier comment), but so is London. And the downsides of NYC - crime, racial tension, MAGA-Trump, divided country, healthcare, opiates, guns - now seem to me to outweigh the downsides of London: weather, greyness, grotty areas
Both are English-speaking world cities with glorious culture, London has more history, New York City has that skyline
The proximity of the rest of Europe might be the clincher for me, if I was a highly paid tech exec. And where do you want your kids to grow up? Safely?
But of course I am biased
I think we will see more American execs choosing London on a quasi-WFH basis. It will be a complex and remarkable irony if post-Brexit London ascends to world capital status (again?)..... because it is in Europe
Yes, that's why I think London is a good shout for operational and potentially tax HQ. My point on NYC is more in relation to having the sales function for NA run out of there rather than SF because it has significantly better crossover with London and it's only a 7h flight for when seniors and execs need face to face meetings.
The London/NYC split works brilliantly for financial services, it being replicated for tech would be no surprise.
The last piece of the puzzle is higher risk funds in London willing to invest hundreds of millions for series D onwards.
Yes, I concur
Finance/sales stuff might stay in NYC but a lot of intellectual/HQ heft will move to London
Add in the boost from Hong Kong and - perhaps unexpectedly - London could really thrive in the next decade
I wonder if this is what I sensed in King's X yesterday. Essentially they are - wittingly or not - creating a Silicon Valley in an amazing new London neighborhood, but with added universities and science institutes and art galleries and biochemistry labs and the British Library and the rest, and all of it 300m from St Pancras and the eurostar, and half an hour from Heathrow via the Liz Line, with Shoreditch and the Silicon roundabout just down the road
It is completely unique. London - esp King's X - has the chance to be THE tech hub for the world, or at least the western world
If I was the head of Instagram, I'd move from California to King's Cross (never thought I'd write that). Just to see
Kings Cross? Would you like to know about living there in the before times? Of COURSE you would...
I moved to that London in July 1999. I had graduated with a Journalism Degree in summer 1998 already working in radio on various short term contracts. By late spring 1999 there was a gap, and I was a bit fed up with the GF I was living with. So moved to London to find a job.
Which I did in 7 working days. Literally. Arrived Sunday. Agency interviews Monday, job interviews later that week, a 2nd interview the following Monday and started working for Nature the science journal straight away.
Their office is on Crinan Street, the north end of KX station with the canal basin behind. So I rented a 1 bed mini bedsit at the top of Grays Inn Road and started work. Kings Cross at the time was home to only one thriving industry - hookers. I was propositioned at 8am one morning crossing the road by the station on the way to work! There was so little in the way of facilities in Kings Cross that the company had a free canteen for its employees - there literally being nothing available in the vicinity.
At the top of Crinan Street was a pub which had been an old canal warehouse - now demolished and the site of Guardian Newspapers building. And a wine bar on Balfe Street. Aside from the Flying Scotsman fight bar on Caledonian Road, that was it.
The transformation in 20 years is literally mindblowing.
I remember that! Went to see someone in that office a few years earlier, perhaps 1992-3, when it was still very new. I did wince when I turned out of KX and saw the ambience of that street, and I was glad to be getting back to the train while it was still daylight.
In those days there was a ramp off the end of platform 1 out onto York Road. So you could exit the station, cross the street and be into the Nature building inside 30 seconds. Barely time to wave at Clive Sinclair in his penthouse...
I need to go back and explore the KX/StP area properly when I next visit my Camden friend; so much change there, including StP itself which was still very much its original state when I knew it, as described in Jack Simmons's history; didn't have time to more than pay homage to Hardy at the eponymous church, and to register the degree of change when passing through it in recent years, which needed a new edition of the history.
You can spend a whole day there, pretty much
Explore the new urbanism, check out the art galleries, see St Martin's, go to a movie or a play or a concert in one of the venues, have lunch or dinner (or both) in one of about 40 restaurants. Walk around Camley Street Wildpark, stroll along the Regent's Canal to Camden and Primrose Hill and back, go to the British Library, and more
All in that one district. Surrounded by industrial history Vs the new Google HQ. Fab
Mm, that's an idea - the canal walk in particular, especially as my chum lives in Camden.
This reminds me I got hold of this paper some years back for him - archaeological dig. No idea if it is of interest but he was very taken with it.
I had a little historical frisson yesterday. The HS2 guys are digging right outside my front door. I had a chat with one of them, a nice guy, and seriously Irish
And it occurred to me that this was a superb echo of when the very first railways were built, when Irish navvies would have worked in the exact same spot, then gone off to drink in the Dublin Castle (hence its name)
They would have worked by the houses in this famous print, middle right. One of these houses, as it happens, being the house where I now live
There's a quite good Melvin Bragg thing (possibly an In Our Time) about the first railways to come out of London. Broad arch of the story is that it was too expensive to roll them through the already posh parts, so they ploughed them through the slums. Middle-class people from the posh parts who could afford the newfangled trains were then exposed to the slums in ways they hadn't been before and lo-and-behold huge reforms began.
And many were made destitute and homeless. Compensation paid to landlords not tenants. Agar Town and Tomlin's New Town, north of Hyde Park, were totally demolished. 56 000 people displaced in about a decade in London. The slums moved further out, and the centre became more gentrified.
They quite possibly went into that too. It's been... urm... maybe 10 years since it was broadcast so I'm remembering it in rather broad strokes.
Somewhat related - Jonathan Meades very first TV series about house-building in Victorian London ('The Victorian House') is worth digging out. As is, in a rather different though applicable vein, the early Adam Curtis 'The Great British Housing Disaster'.
Nick Clegg joins clique of Meta bosses switching to London
https:/Yes, is back, part time…
Clegg is back, and London is back!
From that thread of articles:
"Hoberman said: “They also move because they see the US so fractionalised. As San Francisco loses its density [of tech headquarters], there’s a chance for London to be the global leader.”"
This is absolutely true. Why step over homeless addict in SF when you can be in glorious sunny London? In King's X? With no threat of Trump? And two hours from all of Europe?
I saw recently that parts of East London have taken over SF for density of tech startups. Kings cross looks like the choice for established tech so will be another huge draw for startups looking for global locations. I know one SAAS company which is currently HQ'd in SF that's considering moving operationally to London from there and leaving behind a small outpost of sales people in NYC. That's the other one that's coming for SF, operational excellence in development by being based in London and sales/GTM based on the East Coast of the US either in NYC or Miami. It's such a better set of timezones. SF used to have the advantage of crossover with APAC countries but with the ease of remote work and setting up remote workers on a single payroll tech companies are choosing to hire locally in Singapore, Melbourne and Wellington.
FPT
Yes, and more: as NYC sinks into crime, and is menaced by deeper political division, a lot of business in NYC will come here. Remote working suddenly benefits the UK
Really. Why would you work in NYC or LA or SF if you can work in London?
NYC is a truly great city and LA is jolly interesting and SF has a certain beauty, but they have grave downsides, and they are all trillions of miles from anywhere else
Fly two hours from NYC and you are in, er, Toronto
Compare that with London, when in 2 hours or less you can be in Paris, Venice, Berlin, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Rome, Florence, Edinburgh, Nice... and the Alps, the Balearics, Sicily, western Ireland, Burgundy, the Algarve, the Black Forest, the Dordogne, the Italian lakes, the Dolomites, Tyrol,...
There is no comparison. If your job is no longer quite so tied to the Silicon Valley office, you will move to London
NYC makes sense for a lot of reasons despite the crime (and it's nowhere near as bad as SF) it's got the 2pm-6pm crossover with London, there's already quite a few companies in the area, it's bigger and better connected than SF (which means people have the option of living in NJ and commuting in) and it's only 7h on a cheap business class flight from London for business meetings. For tech startups there's also a fuckton of potential clients on the doorstep in NYC because there's so many financial services companies looking to cut costs. The City is one of the reasons tech has thrived in London, its clients and financing for startups.
NYC is unquestionably a magnificent city (as I said in my earlier comment), but so is London. And the downsides of NYC - crime, racial tension, MAGA-Trump, divided country, healthcare, opiates, guns - now seem to me to outweigh the downsides of London: weather, greyness, grotty areas
Both are English-speaking world cities with glorious culture, London has more history, New York City has that skyline
The proximity of the rest of Europe might be the clincher for me, if I was a highly paid tech exec. And where do you want your kids to grow up? Safely?
But of course I am biased
I think we will see more American execs choosing London on a quasi-WFH basis. It will be a complex and remarkable irony if post-Brexit London ascends to world capital status (again?)..... because it is in Europe
Yes, that's why I think London is a good shout for operational and potentially tax HQ. My point on NYC is more in relation to having the sales function for NA run out of there rather than SF because it has significantly better crossover with London and it's only a 7h flight for when seniors and execs need face to face meetings.
The London/NYC split works brilliantly for financial services, it being replicated for tech would be no surprise.
The last piece of the puzzle is higher risk funds in London willing to invest hundreds of millions for series D onwards.
Yes, I concur
Finance/sales stuff might stay in NYC but a lot of intellectual/HQ heft will move to London
Add in the boost from Hong Kong and - perhaps unexpectedly - London could really thrive in the next decade
I wonder if this is what I sensed in King's X yesterday. Essentially they are - wittingly or not - creating a Silicon Valley in an amazing new London neighborhood, but with added universities and science institutes and art galleries and biochemistry labs and the British Library and the rest, and all of it 300m from St Pancras and the eurostar, and half an hour from Heathrow via the Liz Line, with Shoreditch and the Silicon roundabout just down the road
It is completely unique. London - esp King's X - has the chance to be THE tech hub for the world, or at least the western world
If I was the head of Instagram, I'd move from California to King's Cross (never thought I'd write that). Just to see
Kings Cross? Would you like to know about living there in the before times? Of COURSE you would...
I moved to that London in July 1999. I had graduated with a Journalism Degree in summer 1998 already working in radio on various short term contracts. By late spring 1999 there was a gap, and I was a bit fed up with the GF I was living with. So moved to London to find a job.
Which I did in 7 working days. Literally. Arrived Sunday. Agency interviews Monday, job interviews later that week, a 2nd interview the following Monday and started working for Nature the science journal straight away.
Their office is on Crinan Street, the north end of KX station with the canal basin behind. So I rented a 1 bed mini bedsit at the top of Grays Inn Road and started work. Kings Cross at the time was home to only one thriving industry - hookers. I was propositioned at 8am one morning crossing the road by the station on the way to work! There was so little in the way of facilities in Kings Cross that the company had a free canteen for its employees - there literally being nothing available in the vicinity.
At the top of Crinan Street was a pub which had been an old canal warehouse - now demolished and the site of Guardian Newspapers building. And a wine bar on Balfe Street. Aside from the Flying Scotsman fight bar on Caledonian Road, that was it.
The transformation in 20 years is literally mindblowing.
I remember that! Went to see someone in that office a few years earlier, perhaps 1992-3, when it was still very new. I did wince when I turned out of KX and saw the ambience of that street, and I was glad to be getting back to the train while it was still daylight.
In those days there was a ramp off the end of platform 1 out onto York Road. So you could exit the station, cross the street and be into the Nature building inside 30 seconds. Barely time to wave at Clive Sinclair in his penthouse...
I need to go back and explore the KX/StP area properly when I next visit my Camden friend; so much change there, including StP itself which was still very much its original state when I knew it, as described in Jack Simmons's history; didn't have time to more than pay homage to Hardy at the eponymous church, and to register the degree of change when passing through it in recent years, which needed a new edition of the history.
You can spend a whole day there, pretty much
Explore the new urbanism, check out the art galleries, see St Martin's, go to a movie or a play or a concert in one of the venues, have lunch or dinner (or both) in one of about 40 restaurants. Walk around Camley Street Wildpark, stroll along the Regent's Canal to Camden and Primrose Hill and back, go to the British Library, and more
All in that one district. Surrounded by industrial history Vs the new Google HQ. Fab
Mm, that's an idea - the canal walk in particular, especially as my chum lives in Camden.
This reminds me I got hold of this paper some years back for him - archaeological dig. No idea if it is of interest but he was very taken with it.
I had a little historical frisson yesterday. The HS2 guys are digging right outside my front door. I had a chat with one of them, a nice guy, and seriously Irish
And it occurred to me that this was a superb echo of when the very first railways were built, when Irish navvies would have worked in the exact same spot, then gone off to drink in the Dublin Castle (hence its name)
They would have worked by the houses in this famous print, middle right. One of these houses, as it happens, being the house where I now live
There's a quite good Melvin Bragg thing (possibly an In Our Time) about the first railways to come out of London. Broad arch of the story is that it was too expensive to roll them through the already posh parts, so they ploughed them through the slums. Middle-class people from the posh parts who could afford the newfangled trains were then exposed to the slums in ways they hadn't been before and lo-and-behold huge reforms began.
You got me looking for that In Our Time railway episode, which sounds fascinating.
I haven't found it (yet) but there are a mind-blowing 959 IOT episodes! Of which I've listened to about a dozen.
You have sorted out my podcast listening for the next few months. Thanks!
It's a remarkable series. One of the gems of BBC radio.
For some reason I don’t always put Melvyn in my top 10 greatest living Englishmen* (the luxuriant hair maybe?) but he should definitely be there.
This season's gimmick on The Hundred seems to be interviewing a fielder mid play. He's got a mic and an earpiece attached and occasionally has to run towards the ball mid answer.
I recall them doing something in the IPL one year I think. It was stupid then.
To my mind the positive gimmick of The Hundred was hgiving such prominence to the women's fixtures as well as the Men's. The rest was all too trivial a difference to even count as a gimmick.
Nick Clegg joins clique of Meta bosses switching to London
https:/Yes, is back, part time…
Clegg is back, and London is back!
From that thread of articles:
"Hoberman said: “They also move because they see the US so fractionalised. As San Francisco loses its density [of tech headquarters], there’s a chance for London to be the global leader.”"
This is absolutely true. Why step over homeless addict in SF when you can be in glorious sunny London? In King's X? With no threat of Trump? And two hours from all of Europe?
I saw recently that parts of East London have taken over SF for density of tech startups. Kings cross looks like the choice for established tech so will be another huge draw for startups looking for global locations. I know one SAAS company which is currently HQ'd in SF that's considering moving operationally to London from there and leaving behind a small outpost of sales people in NYC. That's the other one that's coming for SF, operational excellence in development by being based in London and sales/GTM based on the East Coast of the US either in NYC or Miami. It's such a better set of timezones. SF used to have the advantage of crossover with APAC countries but with the ease of remote work and setting up remote workers on a single payroll tech companies are choosing to hire locally in Singapore, Melbourne and Wellington.
FPT
Yes, and more: as NYC sinks into crime, and is menaced by deeper political division, a lot of business in NYC will come here. Remote working suddenly benefits the UK
Really. Why would you work in NYC or LA or SF if you can work in London?
NYC is a truly great city and LA is jolly interesting and SF has a certain beauty, but they have grave downsides, and they are all trillions of miles from anywhere else
Fly two hours from NYC and you are in, er, Toronto
Compare that with London, when in 2 hours or less you can be in Paris, Venice, Berlin, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Rome, Florence, Edinburgh, Nice... and the Alps, the Balearics, Sicily, western Ireland, Burgundy, the Algarve, the Black Forest, the Dordogne, the Italian lakes, the Dolomites, Tyrol,...
There is no comparison. If your job is no longer quite so tied to the Silicon Valley office, you will move to London
NYC makes sense for a lot of reasons despite the crime (and it's nowhere near as bad as SF) it's got the 2pm-6pm crossover with London, there's already quite a few companies in the area, it's bigger and better connected than SF (which means people have the option of living in NJ and commuting in) and it's only 7h on a cheap business class flight from London for business meetings. For tech startups there's also a fuckton of potential clients on the doorstep in NYC because there's so many financial services companies looking to cut costs. The City is one of the reasons tech has thrived in London, its clients and financing for startups.
NYC is unquestionably a magnificent city (as I said in my earlier comment), but so is London. And the downsides of NYC - crime, racial tension, MAGA-Trump, divided country, healthcare, opiates, guns - now seem to me to outweigh the downsides of London: weather, greyness, grotty areas
Both are English-speaking world cities with glorious culture, London has more history, New York City has that skyline
The proximity of the rest of Europe might be the clincher for me, if I was a highly paid tech exec. And where do you want your kids to grow up? Safely?
But of course I am biased
I think we will see more American execs choosing London on a quasi-WFH basis. It will be a complex and remarkable irony if post-Brexit London ascends to world capital status (again?)..... because it is in Europe
Yes, that's why I think London is a good shout for operational and potentially tax HQ. My point on NYC is more in relation to having the sales function for NA run out of there rather than SF because it has significantly better crossover with London and it's only a 7h flight for when seniors and execs need face to face meetings.
The London/NYC split works brilliantly for financial services, it being replicated for tech would be no surprise.
The last piece of the puzzle is higher risk funds in London willing to invest hundreds of millions for series D onwards.
Yes, I concur
Finance/sales stuff might stay in NYC but a lot of intellectual/HQ heft will move to London
Add in the boost from Hong Kong and - perhaps unexpectedly - London could really thrive in the next decade
I wonder if this is what I sensed in King's X yesterday. Essentially they are - wittingly or not - creating a Silicon Valley in an amazing new London neighborhood, but with added universities and science institutes and art galleries and biochemistry labs and the British Library and the rest, and all of it 300m from St Pancras and the eurostar, and half an hour from Heathrow via the Liz Line, with Shoreditch and the Silicon roundabout just down the road
It is completely unique. London - esp King's X - has the chance to be THE tech hub for the world, or at least the western world
If I was the head of Instagram, I'd move from California to King's Cross (never thought I'd write that). Just to see
Kings Cross? Would you like to know about living there in the before times? Of COURSE you would...
I moved to that London in July 1999. I had graduated with a Journalism Degree in summer 1998 already working in radio on various short term contracts. By late spring 1999 there was a gap, and I was a bit fed up with the GF I was living with. So moved to London to find a job.
Which I did in 7 working days. Literally. Arrived Sunday. Agency interviews Monday, job interviews later that week, a 2nd interview the following Monday and started working for Nature the science journal straight away.
Their office is on Crinan Street, the north end of KX station with the canal basin behind. So I rented a 1 bed mini bedsit at the top of Grays Inn Road and started work. Kings Cross at the time was home to only one thriving industry - hookers. I was propositioned at 8am one morning crossing the road by the station on the way to work! There was so little in the way of facilities in Kings Cross that the company had a free canteen for its employees - there literally being nothing available in the vicinity.
At the top of Crinan Street was a pub which had been an old canal warehouse - now demolished and the site of Guardian Newspapers building. And a wine bar on Balfe Street. Aside from the Flying Scotsman fight bar on Caledonian Road, that was it.
The transformation in 20 years is literally mindblowing.
I remember that! Went to see someone in that office a few years earlier, perhaps 1992-3, when it was still very new. I did wince when I turned out of KX and saw the ambience of that street, and I was glad to be getting back to the train while it was still daylight.
In those days there was a ramp off the end of platform 1 out onto York Road. So you could exit the station, cross the street and be into the Nature building inside 30 seconds. Barely time to wave at Clive Sinclair in his penthouse...
I need to go back and explore the KX/StP area properly when I next visit my Camden friend; so much change there, including StP itself which was still very much its original state when I knew it, as described in Jack Simmons's history; didn't have time to more than pay homage to Hardy at the eponymous church, and to register the degree of change when passing through it in recent years, which needed a new edition of the history.
You can spend a whole day there, pretty much
Explore the new urbanism, check out the art galleries, see St Martin's, go to a movie or a play or a concert in one of the venues, have lunch or dinner (or both) in one of about 40 restaurants. Walk around Camley Street Wildpark, stroll along the Regent's Canal to Camden and Primrose Hill and back, go to the British Library, and more
All in that one district. Surrounded by industrial history Vs the new Google HQ. Fab
Mm, that's an idea - the canal walk in particular, especially as my chum lives in Camden.
This reminds me I got hold of this paper some years back for him - archaeological dig. No idea if it is of interest but he was very taken with it.
I had a little historical frisson yesterday. The HS2 guys are digging right outside my front door. I had a chat with one of them, a nice guy, and seriously Irish
And it occurred to me that this was a superb echo of when the very first railways were built, when Irish navvies would have worked in the exact same spot, then gone off to drink in the Dublin Castle (hence its name)
They would have worked by the houses in this famous print, middle right. One of these houses, as it happens, being the house where I now live
There's a quite good Melvin Bragg thing (possibly an In Our Time) about the first railways to come out of London. Broad arch of the story is that it was too expensive to roll them through the already posh parts, so they ploughed them through the slums. Middle-class people from the posh parts who could afford the newfangled trains were then exposed to the slums in ways they hadn't been before and lo-and-behold huge reforms began.
You got me looking for that In Our Time railway episode, which sounds fascinating.
I haven't found it (yet) but there are a mind-blowing 959 IOT episodes! Of which I've listened to about a dozen.
You have sorted out my podcast listening for the next few months. Thanks!
It's a remarkable series. One of the gems of BBC radio.
https://twitter.com/arawnsley/status/1554903595258191872 SCOOP from me and @swin24 : January 6th committee is planning to request Alex Jones' text messages and emails from the Sandy Hook attorneys after his lawyer accidentally sent years worth of comms to the plaintiffs.
https://twitter.com/arawnsley/status/1554903595258191872 SCOOP from me and @swin24 : January 6th committee is planning to request Alex Jones' text messages and emails from the Sandy Hook attorneys after his lawyer accidentally sent years worth of comms to the plaintiffs.
There must be some massive market for superhero and comic book films - which are essentially all the same - that just totally passes me by.
It seems dozens are released a year, and they must be popular, yet I haven't seen a single one and have no intention to.
Done right many of the best action movies are comic ones, though certainly the genre can contain its fair share of duds. So the real question surely is whether you like action movies or not? To say they're all essentially the same is like saying that Die Hard is the same as Highlander 2: The Quickening.
3 related reasons why superhero movies work so well:
1: A lot of movies are based on literature, and there's a wealth of stories written over the past 70-odd years of comics to base movies upon.
2: A wealth of fleshed out characters to build stories with.
3: A good action movie really needs a good villain. Die Hard without Hans Gruber would not be the same thing. In the past Hollywood might typically cast the British, Germans or Russians as a villain in a lot of films, but nowadays they are so politically correct that they try to avoid casting anyone as a villain that might offend markets they want to launch the product in. So real-world based movies have become increasingly bizarre at finding good villains. Corrupt businessmen seems to be the go-to nowadays which is hardly fun, or more realistic.
The last is possibly the most important. Comics have not just heroes, but possibly even more importantly a rich tapestry of a rogue's gallery to work with. Hollywood won't make a movie with the Chinese as villains, but with Thanos there's no need to hold back.
Whilst there are the everpresent dangers of becoming too formulaic and bland, for me 'comic book movies' often work for the same reason fantasy and science fiction can work.
Sure there are typical tropes that people think of as being emblematic of all such works, but really you can tell any type of story you want - gritty, philosophical, silly, romantic, swashbuckling, whatever - and also add spaceships, magic, or dragons etc. It can be utterly realistic, but for a single fantastical element, or pure childish nonsense, whatever you want.
Like most people I had no idea Blade was a comic book character when I watched the 1998 Wesley Snipes movie, and there's nothing about it that would make it seem essentially like a prototypical marvel film today.
Jim Sciutto @jimsciutto New: Fmr Trump deputy WH counsel Patrick Philbin has been subpoenaed in federal criminal probe of January 6 attack, @CNN reporting. Philbin worked in the White House counsel’s office under Pat Cipollone, who was also subpoenaed
This season's gimmick on The Hundred seems to be interviewing a fielder mid play. He's got a mic and an earpiece attached and occasionally has to run towards the ball mid answer.
I recall them doing something in the IPL one year I think. It was stupid then.
To my mind the positive gimmick of The Hundred was hgiving such prominence to the women's fixtures as well as the Men's. The rest was all too trivial a difference to even count as a gimmick.
There must be some massive market for superhero and comic book films - which are essentially all the same - that just totally passes me by.
It seems dozens are released a year, and they must be popular, yet I haven't seen a single one and have no intention to.
Done right many of the best action movies are comic ones, though certainly the genre can contain its fair share of duds. So the real question surely is whether you like action movies or not? To say they're all essentially the same is like saying that Die Hard is the same as Highlander 2: The Quickening.
3 related reasons why superhero movies work so well:
1: A lot of movies are based on literature, and there's a wealth of stories written over the past 70-odd years of comics to base movies upon.
2: A wealth of fleshed out characters to build stories with.
3: A good action movie really needs a good villain. Die Hard without Hans Gruber would not be the same thing. In the past Hollywood might typically cast the British, Germans or Russians as a villain in a lot of films, but nowadays they are so politically correct that they try to avoid casting anyone as a villain that might offend markets they want to launch the product in. So real-world based movies have become increasingly bizarre at finding good villains. Corrupt businessmen seems to be the go-to nowadays which is hardly fun, or more realistic.
The last is possibly the most important. Comics have not just heroes, but possibly even more importantly a rich tapestry of a rogue's gallery to work with. Hollywood won't make a movie with the Chinese as villains, but with Thanos there's no need to hold back.
Whilst there are the everpresent dangers of becoming too formulaic and bland, for me 'comic book movies' often work for the same reason fantasy and science fiction can work.
Sure there are typical tropes that people think of as being emblematic of all such works, but really you can tell any type of story you want - gritty, philosophical, silly, romantic, swashbuckling, whatever - and also add spaceships, magic, or dragons etc. It can be utterly realistic, but for a single fantastical element, or pure childish nonsense, whatever you want.
Like most people I had no idea Blade was a comic book character when I watched the 1998 Wesley Snipes movie, and there's nothing about it that would make it seem essentially like a prototypical marvel film today.
Like CR I have no interest in Superhero films, and am not much of one for action films either. I prefer films about character, than special effects and implausible plots.
Marlon James expounds an interesting idea though that Superhero adventures are the equivalent of Greek, Norse, or other mythologies, with the Superheros as gods amongst the mortals.
“And again our country has failed a 12-year-old child“
I’m sorry, but no. I know she’s a grieving mother. And I’ve refrained from commenting either privately or publicly until now. But when the poor boy’s poor mother makes statements like that (and others, far worse), it’s only right that they’re challenged.
That kid has received some of the best medical care from one of the best health services the modern world has ever seen.
“Who failed Archie?” is, bluntly, not an argument his family should want to start. That line of argument could end very badly for them.
A UK law firm is investigating a potential group legal action against Uefa on behalf of Liverpool fans regarding the chaotic events at the Champions League final in Paris in May.
Leigh Day said it was investigating the potential claim for individuals who suffered physical or psychological injuries, after being contacted by a number of supporters. The firm said it believed 5-10,000 people could be affected and would be able to join the claim, which is to allege that Uefa failed to ensure a safe and secure environment for those attending.
“And again our country has failed a 12-year-old child“
I’m sorry, but no. I know she’s a grieving mother. And I’ve refrained from commenting either privately or publicly until now. But when the poor boy’s poor mother makes statements like that (and others, far worse), it’s only right that they’re challenged.
That kid has received some of the best medical care from one of the best health services the modern world has ever seen.
“Who failed Archie?” is, bluntly, not an argument his family should want to start. That line of argument could end very badly for them.
Correct. He has been dead since his nearly successful suicide attempt and even deader since his brain went necrotic several weeks back
This is how benign contempt for Christians turns into incredulous loathing
A UK law firm is investigating a potential group legal action against Uefa on behalf of Liverpool fans regarding the chaotic events at the Champions League final in Paris in May.
Leigh Day said it was investigating the potential claim for individuals who suffered physical or psychological injuries, after being contacted by a number of supporters. The firm said it believed 5-10,000 people could be affected and would be able to join the claim, which is to allege that Uefa failed to ensure a safe and secure environment for those attending.
A UK law firm is investigating a potential group legal action against Uefa on behalf of Liverpool fans regarding the chaotic events at the Champions League final in Paris in May.
Leigh Day said it was investigating the potential claim for individuals who suffered physical or psychological injuries, after being contacted by a number of supporters. The firm said it believed 5-10,000 people could be affected and would be able to join the claim, which is to allege that Uefa failed to ensure a safe and secure environment for those attending.
“And again our country has failed a 12-year-old child“
I’m sorry, but no. I know she’s a grieving mother. And I’ve refrained from commenting either privately or publicly until now. But when the poor boy’s poor mother makes statements like that (and others, far worse), it’s only right that they’re challenged.
That kid has received some of the best medical care from one of the best health services the modern world has ever seen.
“Who failed Archie?” is, bluntly, not an argument his family should want to start. That line of argument could end very badly for them.
Correct. He has been dead since his nearly successful suicide attempt and even deader since his brain went necrotic several weeks back
This is how benign contempt for Christians turns into incredulous loathing
Be more compassionate. This is every parents worst nightmare. I can’t imagine what this would be like or how I would behave.
What a fabulous performance by Eilish McColgan . My favourite moment of the games so far . I remember her mum winning and amazing to see her daughter following in her footsteps. And Flower of Scotland is really uplifting .
A UK law firm is investigating a potential group legal action against Uefa on behalf of Liverpool fans regarding the chaotic events at the Champions League final in Paris in May.
Leigh Day said it was investigating the potential claim for individuals who suffered physical or psychological injuries, after being contacted by a number of supporters. The firm said it believed 5-10,000 people could be affected and would be able to join the claim, which is to allege that Uefa failed to ensure a safe and secure environment for those attending.
A UK law firm is investigating a potential group legal action against Uefa on behalf of Liverpool fans regarding the chaotic events at the Champions League final in Paris in May.
Leigh Day said it was investigating the potential claim for individuals who suffered physical or psychological injuries, after being contacted by a number of supporters. The firm said it believed 5-10,000 people could be affected and would be able to join the claim, which is to allege that Uefa failed to ensure a safe and secure environment for those attending.
French for What do you expect if you go to a murderous shithole to watch a shit murderous football team. Leigh Day make me embarrassed to have been a solicitor.
What a fabulous performance by Eilish McColgan . My favourite moment of the games so far . I remember her mum winning and amazing to see her daughter following in her footsteps. And Flower of Scotland is really uplifting .
Flower of Scotland is a dirge. But a fabulous performance.
“And again our country has failed a 12-year-old child“
I’m sorry, but no. I know she’s a grieving mother. And I’ve refrained from commenting either privately or publicly until now. But when the poor boy’s poor mother makes statements like that (and others, far worse), it’s only right that they’re challenged.
That kid has received some of the best medical care from one of the best health services the modern world has ever seen.
“Who failed Archie?” is, bluntly, not an argument his family should want to start. That line of argument could end very badly for them.
Correct. He has been dead since his nearly successful suicide attempt and even deader since his brain went necrotic several weeks back
This is how benign contempt for Christians turns into incredulous loathing
Be more compassionate. This is every parents worst nightmare. I can’t imagine what this would be like or how I would behave.
What a fabulous performance by Eilish McColgan . My favourite moment of the games so far . I remember her mum winning and amazing to see her daughter following in her footsteps. And Flower of Scotland is really uplifting .
Flower of Scotland is a dirge. But a fabulous performance.
I can't help it but I rather like Flower of Scotland. My head says I shouldn't but my heart still likes it.
“And again our country has failed a 12-year-old child“
I’m sorry, but no. I know she’s a grieving mother. And I’ve refrained from commenting either privately or publicly until now. But when the poor boy’s poor mother makes statements like that (and others, far worse), it’s only right that they’re challenged.
That kid has received some of the best medical care from one of the best health services the modern world has ever seen.
“Who failed Archie?” is, bluntly, not an argument his family should want to start. That line of argument could end very badly for them.
I agree. Children's intensive care for several months is not just a financial expense, but also has a major opportunity cost in that that bed cannot be used to support neurosurgery or cardiac surgery on other children. In the USA the medical bill would probably be half a million dollars by now, but no cost to the parents.
Of course the death of a child is traumatic and tragic, but ventilating a corpse for another few months is not appropriate treatment of parental bereavement.
“And again our country has failed a 12-year-old child“
I’m sorry, but no. I know she’s a grieving mother. And I’ve refrained from commenting either privately or publicly until now. But when the poor boy’s poor mother makes statements like that (and others, far worse), it’s only right that they’re challenged.
That kid has received some of the best medical care from one of the best health services the modern world has ever seen.
“Who failed Archie?” is, bluntly, not an argument his family should want to start. That line of argument could end very badly for them.
Correct. He has been dead since his nearly successful suicide attempt and even deader since his brain went necrotic several weeks back
This is how benign contempt for Christians turns into incredulous loathing
Be more compassionate. This is every parents worst nightmare. I can’t imagine what this would be like or how I would behave.
Me neither. However, a "compassionate" Christian group might be offering every resource they had to help the parents come to terms with their unimaginable loss. Rather than an army of lawyers to prolong their pain.
A UK law firm is investigating a potential group legal action against Uefa on behalf of Liverpool fans regarding the chaotic events at the Champions League final in Paris in May.
Leigh Day said it was investigating the potential claim for individuals who suffered physical or psychological injuries, after being contacted by a number of supporters. The firm said it believed 5-10,000 people could be affected and would be able to join the claim, which is to allege that Uefa failed to ensure a safe and secure environment for those attending.
I am done with the Tory Party if Suella Braverman is made Home Secretary.
Hmmm.
Offering Sunak HS is quite a good idea.
Offering my daughter’s new cat HS is a good idea if the alternative is Braverman.
Ah, my HS stood for Health Secretary - not a sensible abbreviation. That's the rumoured offer. It's senior enough for it not to be a snub, but takes him out of the running of the country bit, and gives him plenty of scope for penny pinching.
I wouldn't move Patel from Home Secretary myself - just keep her in there forever. Swapping her with Braverman I see nothing to be gained, and a fair bit of experience in the role lost.
Looking at the reports of who Truss is going to put in her Cabinet - and in what jobs - it looks like she is very focused on maximising anti-Tory tactical voting.
“And again our country has failed a 12-year-old child“
I’m sorry, but no. I know she’s a grieving mother. And I’ve refrained from commenting either privately or publicly until now. But when the poor boy’s poor mother makes statements like that (and others, far worse), it’s only right that they’re challenged.
That kid has received some of the best medical care from one of the best health services the modern world has ever seen.
“Who failed Archie?” is, bluntly, not an argument his family should want to start. That line of argument could end very badly for them.
Correct. He has been dead since his nearly successful suicide attempt and even deader since his brain went necrotic several weeks back
This is how benign contempt for Christians turns into incredulous loathing
Be more compassionate. This is every parents worst nightmare. I can’t imagine what this would be like or how I would behave.
Me neither. However, a "compassionate" Christian group might be offering every resource they had to help the parents come to terms with their unimaginable loss. Rather than an army of lawyers to prolong their pain.
Yes she is wrong and this needs to be done but I still think she needs compassion.
“And again our country has failed a 12-year-old child“
I’m sorry, but no. I know she’s a grieving mother. And I’ve refrained from commenting either privately or publicly until now. But when the poor boy’s poor mother makes statements like that (and others, far worse), it’s only right that they’re challenged.
That kid has received some of the best medical care from one of the best health services the modern world has ever seen.
“Who failed Archie?” is, bluntly, not an argument his family should want to start. That line of argument could end very badly for them.
Correct. He has been dead since his nearly successful suicide attempt and even deader since his brain went necrotic several weeks back
This is how benign contempt for Christians turns into incredulous loathing
Be more compassionate. This is every parents worst nightmare. I can’t imagine what this would be like or how I would behave.
Me neither. However, a "compassionate" Christian group might be offering every resource they had to help the parents come to terms with their unimaginable loss. Rather than an army of lawyers to prolong their pain.
The lawyers on both sides were acting pro bono.
This is The Monkey's Paw in real life except that the parents in that did not have the entire medical profession and every Court in the world explaining loudly and clearly that the child's brain had liquefied and poured out through the bottom of his skull weeks ago. I don't see that the legal or medical professions have put a foot wrong here.
I am done with the Tory Party if Suella Braverman is made Home Secretary.
Hmmm.
Offering Sunak HS is quite a good idea.
Offering my daughter’s new cat HS is a good idea if the alternative is Braverman.
Ah, my HS stood for Health Secretary - not a sensible abbreviation. That's the rumoured offer. It's senior enough for it not to be a snub, but takes him out of the running of the country bit, and gives him plenty of scope for penny pinching.
I wouldn't move Patel from Home Secretary myself - just keep her in there forever. Swapping her with Braverman I see nothing to be gained, and a fair bit of experience in the role lost.
Nick Clegg joins clique of Meta bosses switching to London
https:/Yes, is back, part time…
Clegg is back, and London is back!
From that thread of articles:
"Hoberman said: “They also move because they see the US so fractionalised. As San Francisco loses its density [of tech headquarters], there’s a chance for London to be the global leader.”"
This is absolutely true. Why step over homeless addict in SF when you can be in glorious sunny London? In King's X? With no threat of Trump? And two hours from all of Europe?
I saw recently that parts of East London have taken over SF for density of tech startups. Kings cross looks like the choice for established tech so will be another huge draw for startups looking for global locations. I know one SAAS company which is currently HQ'd in SF that's considering moving operationally to London from there and leaving behind a small outpost of sales people in NYC. That's the other one that's coming for SF, operational excellence in development by being based in London and sales/GTM based on the East Coast of the US either in NYC or Miami. It's such a better set of timezones. SF used to have the advantage of crossover with APAC countries but with the ease of remote work and setting up remote workers on a single payroll tech companies are choosing to hire locally in Singapore, Melbourne and Wellington.
FPT
Yes, and more: as NYC sinks into crime, and is menaced by deeper political division, a lot of business in NYC will come here. Remote working suddenly benefits the UK
Really. Why would you work in NYC or LA or SF if you can work in London?
NYC is a truly great city and LA is jolly interesting and SF has a certain beauty, but they have grave downsides, and they are all trillions of miles from anywhere else
Fly two hours from NYC and you are in, er, Toronto
Compare that with London, when in 2 hours or less you can be in Paris, Venice, Berlin, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Rome, Florence, Edinburgh, Nice... and the Alps, the Balearics, Sicily, western Ireland, Burgundy, the Algarve, the Black Forest, the Dordogne, the Italian lakes, the Dolomites, Tyrol,...
There is no comparison. If your job is no longer quite so tied to the Silicon Valley office, you will move to London
NYC makes sense for a lot of reasons despite the crime (and it's nowhere near as bad as SF) it's got the 2pm-6pm crossover with London, there's already quite a few companies in the area, it's bigger and better connected than SF (which means people have the option of living in NJ and commuting in) and it's only 7h on a cheap business class flight from London for business meetings. For tech startups there's also a fuckton of potential clients on the doorstep in NYC because there's so many financial services companies looking to cut costs. The City is one of the reasons tech has thrived in London, its clients and financing for startups.
NYC is unquestionably a magnificent city (as I said in my earlier comment), but so is London. And the downsides of NYC - crime, racial tension, MAGA-Trump, divided country, healthcare, opiates, guns - now seem to me to outweigh the downsides of London: weather, greyness, grotty areas
Both are English-speaking world cities with glorious culture, London has more history, New York City has that skyline
The proximity of the rest of Europe might be the clincher for me, if I was a highly paid tech exec. And where do you want your kids to grow up? Safely?
But of course I am biased
I think we will see more American execs choosing London on a quasi-WFH basis. It will be a complex and remarkable irony if post-Brexit London ascends to world capital status (again?)..... because it is in Europe
Yes, that's why I think London is a good shout for operational and potentially tax HQ. My point on NYC is more in relation to having the sales function for NA run out of there rather than SF because it has significantly better crossover with London and it's only a 7h flight for when seniors and execs need face to face meetings.
The London/NYC split works brilliantly for financial services, it being replicated for tech would be no surprise.
The last piece of the puzzle is higher risk funds in London willing to invest hundreds of millions for series D onwards.
Yes, I concur
Finance/sales stuff might stay in NYC but a lot of intellectual/HQ heft will move to London
Add in the boost from Hong Kong and - perhaps unexpectedly - London could really thrive in the next decade
I wonder if this is what I sensed in King's X yesterday. Essentially they are - wittingly or not - creating a Silicon Valley in an amazing new London neighborhood, but with added universities and science institutes and art galleries and biochemistry labs and the British Library and the rest, and all of it 300m from St Pancras and the eurostar, and half an hour from Heathrow via the Liz Line, with Shoreditch and the Silicon roundabout just down the road
It is completely unique. London - esp King's X - has the chance to be THE tech hub for the world, or at least the western world
If I was the head of Instagram, I'd move from California to King's Cross (never thought I'd write that). Just to see
Kings Cross? Would you like to know about living there in the before times? Of COURSE you would...
I moved to that London in July 1999. I had graduated with a Journalism Degree in summer 1998 already working in radio on various short term contracts. By late spring 1999 there was a gap, and I was a bit fed up with the GF I was living with. So moved to London to find a job.
Which I did in 7 working days. Literally. Arrived Sunday. Agency interviews Monday, job interviews later that week, a 2nd interview the following Monday and started working for Nature the science journal straight away.
Their office is on Crinan Street, the north end of KX station with the canal basin behind. So I rented a 1 bed mini bedsit at the top of Grays Inn Road and started work. Kings Cross at the time was home to only one thriving industry - hookers. I was propositioned at 8am one morning crossing the road by the station on the way to work! There was so little in the way of facilities in Kings Cross that the company had a free canteen for its employees - there literally being nothing available in the vicinity.
At the top of Crinan Street was a pub which had been an old canal warehouse - now demolished and the site of Guardian Newspapers building. And a wine bar on Balfe Street. Aside from the Flying Scotsman fight bar on Caledonian Road, that was it.
The transformation in 20 years is literally mindblowing.
I remember that! Went to see someone in that office a few years earlier, perhaps 1992-3, when it was still very new. I did wince when I turned out of KX and saw the ambience of that street, and I was glad to be getting back to the train while it was still daylight.
In those days there was a ramp off the end of platform 1 out onto York Road. So you could exit the station, cross the street and be into the Nature building inside 30 seconds. Barely time to wave at Clive Sinclair in his penthouse...
I need to go back and explore the KX/StP area properly when I next visit my Camden friend; so much change there, including StP itself which was still very much its original state when I knew it, as described in Jack Simmons's history; didn't have time to more than pay homage to Hardy at the eponymous church, and to register the degree of change when passing through it in recent years, which needed a new edition of the history.
You can spend a whole day there, pretty much
Explore the new urbanism, check out the art galleries, see St Martin's, go to a movie or a play or a concert in one of the venues, have lunch or dinner (or both) in one of about 40 restaurants. Walk around Camley Street Wildpark, stroll along the Regent's Canal to Camden and Primrose Hill and back, go to the British Library, and more
All in that one district. Surrounded by industrial history Vs the new Google HQ. Fab
Mm, that's an idea - the canal walk in particular, especially as my chum lives in Camden.
This reminds me I got hold of this paper some years back for him - archaeological dig. No idea if it is of interest but he was very taken with it.
I had a little historical frisson yesterday. The HS2 guys are digging right outside my front door. I had a chat with one of them, a nice guy, and seriously Irish
And it occurred to me that this was a superb echo of when the very first railways were built, when Irish navvies would have worked in the exact same spot, then gone off to drink in the Dublin Castle (hence its name)
They would have worked by the houses in this famous print, middle right. One of these houses, as it happens, being the house where I now live
There's a quite good Melvin Bragg thing (possibly an In Our Time) about the first railways to come out of London. Broad arch of the story is that it was too expensive to roll them through the already posh parts, so they ploughed them through the slums. Middle-class people from the posh parts who could afford the newfangled trains were then exposed to the slums in ways they hadn't been before and lo-and-behold huge reforms began.
You got me looking for that In Our Time railway episode, which sounds fascinating.
I haven't found it (yet) but there are a mind-blowing 959 IOT episodes! Of which I've listened to about a dozen.
You have sorted out my podcast listening for the next few months. Thanks!
It's a remarkable series. One of the gems of BBC radio.
For some reason I don’t always put Melvyn in my top 10 greatest living Englishmen* (the luxuriant hair maybe?) but he should definitely be there.
*English person
Northern boy ends up in Hampstead and there the similarity ends. He's one of those people who channels his fundamental unease at our 'situation' into massive lifelong productivity. I remember the SB Show when it started, bit of intellectual telly on a Saturday night, feeling slightly pleased with myself for liking it.
I am done with the Tory Party if Suella Braverman is made Home Secretary.
But that is an incredibly BIPOC Cabinet
My goodness. Kwarteng, Cleverley, Patel, Badenoch, Braverman
I like it. Truss clearly intends to tackle the dinghy people and say Fuck the Woke
BIPOC?
Darkies Black, Indigenous, and people of colour.
If you know of a better term, now we have abandoned "BAME", do please tell
Given that white people are indigenous to Britain, doesn't that description just cover everyone?
Yeah, probably, that's why I like it
Certainly as a Cornishman I am claiming indigenous status. The rest of you may have to give me reparations for enslaving my granny in the St Agnes tin mines when she was but a slip of a child, you heartless fiends
I am done with the Tory Party if Suella Braverman is made Home Secretary.
Hmmm.
Offering Sunak HS is quite a good idea.
Offering my daughter’s new cat HS is a good idea if the alternative is Braverman.
Ah, my HS stood for Health Secretary - not a sensible abbreviation. That's the rumoured offer. It's senior enough for it not to be a snub, but takes him out of the running of the country bit, and gives him plenty of scope for penny pinching.
I wouldn't move Patel from Home Secretary myself - just keep her in there forever. Swapping her with Braverman I see nothing to be gained, and a fair bit of experience in the role lost.
I saw a comment recently that the UK was increasingly a health service with a small country attached. Health and Social Care Secretary is responsible for almost 1/3 of all government spending. It’s a serious job and I hope Sunak takes it.
I am done with the Tory Party if Suella Braverman is made Home Secretary.
Hmmm.
Offering Sunak HS is quite a good idea.
Offering my daughter’s new cat HS is a good idea if the alternative is Braverman.
Ah, my HS stood for Health Secretary - not a sensible abbreviation. That's the rumoured offer. It's senior enough for it not to be a snub, but takes him out of the running of the country bit, and gives him plenty of scope for penny pinching.
I wouldn't move Patel from Home Secretary myself - just keep her in there forever. Swapping her with Braverman I see nothing to be gained, and a fair bit of experience in the role lost.
I saw a comment recently that the UK was increasingly a health service with a small country attached. Health and Social Care Secretary is responsible for almost 1/3 of all government spending. It’s a serious job and I hope Sunak takes it.
Yes; if it's offered, I hope so too. I just don't want him anywhere near the economy.
I am done with the Tory Party if Suella Braverman is made Home Secretary.
But that is an incredibly BIPOC Cabinet
My goodness. Kwarteng, Cleverley, Patel, Badenoch, Braverman
I like it. Truss clearly intends to tackle the dinghy people and say Fuck the Woke
BIPOC?
Darkies Black, Indigenous, and people of colour.
If you know of a better term, now we have abandoned "BAME", do please tell
Brits.
Mate, if only. If only we could all be "Brits". That would - genuinely - be a marvellous day
But you know the Guardian won't allow it. They are already looking for the new word. BIPOC won't last, it is too clumsy, but something else will come along, and last for about 2 years, before being discarded as "racist"
Comments
3 related reasons why superhero movies work so well:
1: A lot of movies are based on literature, and there's a wealth of stories written over the past 70-odd years of comics to base movies upon.
2: A wealth of fleshed out characters to build stories with.
3: A good action movie really needs a good villain. Die Hard without Hans Gruber would not be the same thing. In the past Hollywood might typically cast the British, Germans or Russians as a villain in a lot of films, but nowadays they are so politically correct that they try to avoid casting anyone as a villain that might offend markets they want to launch the product in. So real-world based movies have become increasingly bizarre at finding good villains. Corrupt businessmen seems to be the go-to nowadays which is hardly fun, or more realistic.
The last is possibly the most important. Comics have not just heroes, but possibly even more importantly a rich tapestry of a rogue's gallery to work with. Hollywood won't make a movie with the Chinese as villains, but with Thanos there's no need to hold back.
Betfair next prime minister
1.1 Liz Truss 91%
11 Rishi Sunak 9%
Next Conservative leader
1.09 Liz Truss 92%
11.5 Rishi Sunak 9%
Certainly many are formulaic - so are Pixar films, though the general quality is higher with those - and are marketed very similarly, but The Batman is nothing like X-Men 2 which is nothing like Thor: Love and Thunder, which itself is actually very little like the first Thor movie despite having the same lead and being in the same universe. The first Thor was playing everything very straight and comparitively understated in its action set pieces. The last one was an out and out comedy film with intentionally over the top visuals all the way through - one was about the lead finding humanity, the last all about cosmic deities (but for a subplot) .
'Comic book movies' are not really a genre, despite widespread reference to such. Some are more like spy thrillers, others are dark detective stories, others are pure comedic silliness, some have a moral message, and the quality is all over the place.
Certainly compared to Alex Jones OR the My Pillow Putschist.
No debate, but then it had been very dreary. Much happier flicking between by the Hundred and the Commonwealth Games, both on what Dan Wooton had called the "Britain Bashing Corporation".
Somewhat related - Jonathan Meades very first TV series about house-building in Victorian London ('The Victorian House') is worth digging out. As is, in a rather different though applicable vein, the early Adam Curtis 'The Great British Housing Disaster'.
*English person
To my mind the positive gimmick of The Hundred was hgiving such prominence to the women's fixtures as well as the Men's. The rest was all too trivial a difference to even count as a gimmick.
https://twitter.com/JayinKyiv/status/1554915661062733824
https://twitter.com/arawnsley/status/1554903595258191872
SCOOP from me and @swin24
: January 6th committee is planning to request Alex Jones' text messages and emails from the Sandy Hook attorneys after his lawyer accidentally sent years worth of comms to the plaintiffs.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/child-porn-found-documents-alex-jones-sent-sandy-hook-family-n1018541
https://twitter.com/MNateShyamalan/status/1554922604619866112
I hope the judge gives him 24 consecutive 10 year terms, the trolls him by saying there can be a one-third remission for good conduct.
Sure there are typical tropes that people think of as being emblematic of all such works, but really you can tell any type of story you want - gritty, philosophical, silly, romantic, swashbuckling, whatever - and also add spaceships, magic, or dragons etc. It can be utterly realistic, but for a single fantastical element, or pure childish nonsense, whatever you want.
Like most people I had no idea Blade was a comic book character when I watched the 1998 Wesley Snipes movie, and there's nothing about it that would make it seem essentially like a prototypical marvel film today.
@jimsciutto
New: Fmr Trump deputy WH counsel Patrick Philbin has been subpoenaed in federal criminal probe of January 6 attack,
@CNN
reporting. Philbin worked in the White House counsel’s office under Pat Cipollone, who was also subpoenaed
Kwateng to No11, Patel to Party Chairman, Braverman to Home, Clarke to Biz.
Cleverly to Foreign, Bandenoch to Education as Mordaunt eyes DCMS.
https://twitter.com/MrHarryCole/status/1554927976680198144
I am done with the Tory Party if Suella Braverman is made Home Secretary.
Edit. I see it is Chief Whip.
Marlon James expounds an interesting idea though that Superhero adventures are the equivalent of Greek, Norse, or other mythologies, with the Superheros as gods amongst the mortals.
Soon maybe he'll be done being done with being done with them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_FIFA_U-17_Women's_World_Cup
“And again our country has failed a 12-year-old child“
I’m sorry, but no. I know she’s a grieving mother. And I’ve refrained from commenting either privately or publicly until now. But when the poor boy’s poor mother makes statements like that (and others, far worse), it’s only right that they’re challenged.
That kid has received some of the best medical care from one of the best health services the modern world has ever seen.
“Who failed Archie?” is, bluntly, not an argument his family should want to start. That line of argument could end very badly for them.
A UK law firm is investigating a potential group legal action against Uefa on behalf of Liverpool fans regarding the chaotic events at the Champions League final in Paris in May.
Leigh Day said it was investigating the potential claim for individuals who suffered physical or psychological injuries, after being contacted by a number of supporters. The firm said it believed 5-10,000 people could be affected and would be able to join the claim, which is to allege that Uefa failed to ensure a safe and secure environment for those attending.
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/aug/03/law-firm-investigating-possible-legal-action-against-uefa-for-liverpool-fans
God help me I am starting to like the woman.
This is how benign contempt for Christians turns into incredulous loathing
French for What do you expect if you go to a murderous shithole to watch a shit murderous football team. Leigh Day make me embarrassed to have been a solicitor.
Offering Sunak HS is quite a good idea.
My goodness. Kwarteng, Cleverley, Patel, Badenoch, Braverman
I like it. Truss clearly intends to tackle the dinghy people and say Fuck the Woke
Disgraceful!
Of course the death of a child is traumatic and tragic, but ventilating a corpse for another few months is not appropriate treatment of parental bereavement.
Rather than an army of lawyers to prolong their pain.
Managing Director: We're in a pickle, [goes on to explain a very complex, multi jurisdictional problem]
Me: I've got this brilliant strategy to get us out of this problem, [explains strategy]
MD: Is that legal?
Me: It is rarely prosecuted
Outside counsel: Fucking hell, Martyn Day would be proud
I wouldn't move Patel from Home Secretary myself - just keep her in there forever. Swapping her with Braverman I see nothing to be gained, and a fair bit of experience in the role lost.
So likely to be utter bollx in fact.
BIPOC?
DarkiesBlack, Indigenous, and people of colour.This is The Monkey's Paw in real life except that the parents in that did not have the entire medical profession and every Court in the world explaining loudly and clearly that the child's brain had liquefied and poured out through the bottom of his skull weeks ago. I don't see that the legal or medical professions have put a foot wrong here.
Black, Indigenous People Of Colour
Certainly as a Cornishman I am claiming indigenous status. The rest of you may have to give me reparations for enslaving my granny in the St Agnes tin mines when she was but a slip of a child, you heartless fiends
Kwarteng comes from the Rishi-Sunak-school-of-do-nothing, but is presumably there as someone Truss believes will do her bidding.
IDS’s return is potentially not a bad idea in that if you have to have nutters in your cabinet, he is probably the least awful.
Pushing Patel away from any executive responsibility is also a small mercy.
But you know the Guardian won't allow it. They are already looking for the new word. BIPOC won't last, it is too clumsy, but something else will come along, and last for about 2 years, before being discarded as "racist"