VistaPrint conducted research into the best UK city to start a new business and discovered Manchester tops the charts. Chichester takes the unlikely silver spot, and Bristol and Exeter in the south-west also make the top 10.
The success of small businesses is at the heart of what we do here at VistaPrint. Whether it’s producing professional business cards to share with prospective clients, building your brand with office stationery, or bringing you the latest news and advice in the VistaPrint blog, our goal is the same as yours: to make your business the best it can be.
As part of our dedication to better understanding the challenges facing small businesses across the UK, we examined various metrics to find the best spots for UK entrepreneurs to set up.
We looked at for each city:
- Gross Value Added (or GVA, a metric for assessing an economy’s performance that takes into account population, employment and productivity – the higher the better)
- Average daily business rental costs
- Availability of co-working space
So, thinking of launching a new brand? Wondering where to start a business? Don’t be lured into assuming the best location is London! Let’s take a deep dive into the results.
Manchester is the UK’s entrepreneurial capital
Mancunians are well known for their grit and determination, so perhaps it’s no surprise that this translates into a supportive and dynamic environment, making it one of the top cities for entrepreneurs in the UK. Manchester came top of VistaPrint’s ranking by a good margin, scoring 71/100 compared to Chichester with 63/100 in second place.
It also came way ahead of London’s 54/100 – that’s due in part to the north-west’s “powerhouse” having more affordable rents and a vast number of co-working spaces: with 13.41 per 100,000 people, it has more hot desks per head than anywhere else in the country.
Manchester has plenty to offer new businesses and there’s a lot of evidence that the city is attracting more and more UK start-ups. Manchester is officially the UK’s Top Digital Tech City and its GVA is the highest in the North of England and the fourth highest in the UK. The Start Up Loans Company backs this up: it said it delivered £16.6m of funding through 1,269 loans in the North West in the 2023/24 financial year.
Best UK cities to start a business
The great debate: North vs. South
Our rankings suggest the great north-south divide still plays a role when it comes to the top business-friendly cities in the UK. Of the top 10, only two cities are in the north of England: Manchester and Chester. Six are in the south: Chichester, London, Milton Keynes, Bristol, Exeter, and Brighton and Hove. Birmingham and Edinburgh take the final two spots.
Expanding the results to look at the top 20 cities, we only find four more in the north of England: Newcastle, Liverpool, Leeds, and Durham. Perhaps even more significantly, 10 of the top 20 cities are in the home counties, suggesting that proximity to London is still an influencing factor for success.
It’s also worth noting that 17 of the top 20 cities are in England. Only Cardiff, Edinburgh, and Belfast wave the flag for Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. There’s a clear lack of representation from outside of England.
Where are the cheapest places to rent an office?
VistaPrint used a sample of prices gathered from Zoopla to calculate the average cost of renting an office per day. That data reveals some stark differences across the UK.
Unsurprisingly, the least business-friendly city in the UK when it comes to rent is London, coming in at the very bottom of our ranking with average daily costs of £698. This figure is nearly twice the cost in Oxford, which at £362 was the second most expensive city.
Least expensive cities to rent a desk in UK
If you’re looking to keep your rental costs low, the best UK cities for startups are definitely up north. Chester, Cumbria, Lancashire, and Derbyshire all featured in the top 10 cheapest cities for office space with the city of Chester taking the number one spot – you can get an office here from as little as £18 per day. Carlisle at £24 and Preston at £29 were both bargains too.
But choosing office space is about striking the right balance for your venture. While London is undeniably the most expensive place to start a business, it also has the highest GVA by a significant margin, £81,400 compared to £24,539 for Manchester. That suggests the potential for growth and success could be worth the extra cost.
Conclusion
Overall, when it comes to selecting the right city to start your business, there are lots of variables to take into consideration. Our findings suggest that out of all the cities, Manchester is the clear winner, from both a cost perspective and its entrepreneurial spirit.
Methodology
To develop this ranking, we collected data for 76 UK cities – the number of co-working spaces per 100,000, average office space rental costs per day and total GVA per city. The data was normalised and values calculated per city to provide an overall score, which has been used to rank each city.
Sources:
All 76 cities as determined by: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/list-of-cities/list-of-cities-html
Number of co-working spaces per city gathered from:
https://hubblehq.com
GVA data gathered from:
- Estimates of regional gross value, production of goods and services: https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/grossvalueaddedgva
- GVA in London: https://www.london.gov.uk/who-we-are/what-london-assembly-does/questions-mayor/find-an-answer/gva-london
