Property Blog and News / Want to live in a thriving entrepreneurial city? Here are the top 5

Want to live in a thriving entrepreneurial city? Here are the top 5

11 April 2023

Author

Jamie Obertelli
Head of PR & Communications

The UK is recognised as a leading business and enterprise hub across the globe and living within one of its entrepreneurial hotspots can be a great place to buy a home.

Entrepreneurial spirit and growing businesses ultimately attract top talent and in turn generate wealth. Inevitably, this can drive an uptick in property prices and encourage new services to start-up such as cafes and restaurants which can transform town or city centres.

If you’re looking to move to a thriving entrepreneurial city? Here are the top 5 based on their growing number of registered start-ups compared with population size.

Coventry is named as the UK’s most entrepreneurial city. The city saw 4,361 businesses start-up in 2022 – a 13% increase compared with 2021 – while the city’s population stood at 345,300. This means one company was registered per every 79 people living in the city. The most popular sectors in Coventry include freight transport by road, construction, real estate, and ecommerce.

The research was carried out by Instant Offices – which helps business leaders find a ready-made office to meet their needs. They analysed the latest data from Companies House and then overlaid it with population figures in the UK’s largest cities.

The study placed Birmingham in second place, with the city seeing a 9% rise in new business registrations in 2022 compared with the previous year.

Together with Coventry, this puts the West Midlands in the spotlight, with record business growth in the last 12-months. Last year in 2022, research showed a surge in hiring among tech start-ups in the West Midlands, with the area being named the UK’s fastest growing tech hub the year before.

John Williams, Chief Marketing Officer at Instant Offices, said: “Entrepreneurship has been steadily growing in the UK since the pandemic as more people start new business ventures to become their own boss while pursuing their career ambitions.

“Our analysis proves ambition is thriving across the UK and particularly in the West Midlands. UK businesses which are planning for the future and hoping to gain an edge in talent attraction are increasingly turning to flexibility as a key strategic driver and our latest research shows demand for flexible workspace is up 22% across the country yoy.

UK entrepreneurial hotspots: Top five

City % increase in businesses launched in 2022 vs 2021 New business to population ratio*
Coventry 13% 79
Birmingham 9% 79
Leeds 7% 105
Leicester 4% 62
Stoke-on-Trent 4% 127

 

*One new business started for every X number of people. Eg In Coventry, one new business was registered per every 79 people living in the city in 2022.

Method:

We built a tool to analyse Companies House data and uncover how many new businesses were launched in some of the UK’s top cities between 2022 and 2021. This was overlaid with population data to discover which cities had the highest new business to population ratio.