London has been one of the key pillars of global trade for more than two hundred years. Serving as the political, commercial and cultural capital of the United Kingdom, the city has grown into a hotbed of innovation, creativity and investment.
It has been the home to some famous global brands for decades, such as HSBC, Barclays, Royal Dutch Shell, GlaxoSmithKline, Aviva, and Unilever. It’s also home to startups like Monzo, Bulb, Zopa, and what3words.
There are many reasons why so many businesses continue to choose London to be their home, here are some of the main ones.
Central Location
Sitting just a few hundred miles from the capitals of other great European countries, and as a hub for air travel to the other continents of the world. London’s central location makes it easy to travel to from some of the world’s greatest cities.
A flight from Moscow is 4 hours, from Berlin is 2 hours, from New York is 8 hours, from Dubai is 8 hours, and Hong Kong is 13 hours. There are also direct rail services from the city to Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, 
Strasbourg, and Rotterdam. For Poles, there are daily non-stop flights from London’s airports to Warsaw, Krakow, Gdansk, Katowice, and Wroclaw.
London also has connections to the rest of the UK, including the major cities of Birmingham, Manchester, Cardiff, Glasgow, and Edinburgh, with most major train lines terminating in the capital.
This means a London base for your business gives you quick and easy access to the rest of the UK and the world.
A Large and Diverse Population
With London having a leading role on the world stage for the last few hundred years, being the heart of the former British Empire and, until recently, a key member of the European Union, it has attracted people from all over the world.
Get on any bus or any Underground train and you’ll find a very broad range of nationalities and ethnicities. London has large Asian, African, American, and European populations, each of whom has made their own unique contributions to the culture of the city.
According to Talentlyft, having a diverse workforce can make a business more successful, since it can make better and faster decisions. This diversity gives more perspectives for decision making, taking the learnings from different backgrounds and cultures. This means your London based team will have an advantage over your rivals.
Thanks to this hugely diverse population and the wealth of different entertainment and cultural venues that come from that, London presents more networking opportunities than you’ll find anywhere else in the UK. One example of this is a ladies poker group at the Hippodrome Casino which meets most months and mixes socialising with games of poker.
There’s also a regular event called Ladies Who Latte and events focused on specific sectors like the construction event called Square Mile Property Meet and The Circuit, a monthly event for the creative industry. It’s also the location of many events for the Polish diaspora.
Larger Customer Base
While this doesn’t necessarily apply if you are an online-only business, basing your business will typically give you access to a much larger population than in most other parts of the UK. London has a population of almost 9 million people, while the whole of Scotland has just under 4.5 million.
These 9 million people are crammed into an area of 607 square miles, while Scotland has 30,918 square miles.
This also doesn’t account for the large number of tourists that flock to the city every year, increasing your potential market even further.
London’s population and strong infrastructure give you access to more courier networks than elsewhere in the country too. You can, therefore, open up a business that offers same day, or even same hour, delivery on certain products using these services; amplifying the buying power of those potential customers.
London has, for a very long time, been one of the leading business centres in the world. It’s unlikely that’s going to change in any major way in the foreseeable future, so it continues to be a great place to start a business.
