Economic Geography of The United Kingdom - Finance and Services

Finance and Services

Once, every great city had a stock exchange. Now, the UK financial industry is concentrated overwhelmingly in the City of London and Canary Wharf, with back office and administrative operation often dispersed around the south of England.

London is one of the world's great financial centres, which is one of the factors that is commonly considered to make it a world city. Central London contains some of the most expensive commercial property in the world because of this.

From around the early 1990s London has been able to boast of having more U.S. banks than New York, as well as being host to branches of more than five hundred overseas banks. It is the principal financial centre of the world, ranked alongside New York and Tokyo as one of three where any serious financial player must be represented.

The City of London has around 300,000 employees, largely concentrated in the financial and professional sectors.

Within London, the desire for banks to be there put pressure on the City of London's ability to accommodate them. In the mid-1980s a crisis point was reached and, although the City was able to expand its stock of modern office space, this did not happen before Canary Wharf had been set up as a competitor. The irony is that Canary Wharf was built in the London Docklands that had, until 1970, been among the largest docks in the world. All manner of goods had been shipped from the factories of east London to the world; between 1961 and 1993 manufacturing employment in London fell from 1.6 million to 328,000.

During the mid-90's, Leeds took advantage of the internet's arrival as part of the .com boom. It became the UK's first city to have full broadband and digital coverage, making it a very attractive place for corporations to expand, particularly when opening call centres. During the changing 1990's, Leeds had better connections to London than any other UK city, being 2 hours from London by train. As a result, it is now the UK's 2nd largest financial and legal centre, and the UK's largest e-business sector with more than 1/3 of the UK's internet traffic passing through the city.

In this respect, Canary Wharf and Leeds are arguably more symbolic of the changed economic geography of the UK than any other place.