And Bristol and Bath, and even Cornwall where tech grants grow on trees - honestly, demonstrate a half decent idea and they'll match your investment up to £100k.

There are huge incentives for technology workers and entrepreneurs outside of London, but those already in London are trapped within its diamond dome - I left for good a few days after realising I hadn't been outside of the m25, other than abroad, in several years.

I run a software company and our MD is the queen of government grant (she's ex-local government). Interesting to hear that tech grants grow on trees in your neck of the woods - can I e-mail you a couple of questions?

Cornwall isn't my neck of the woods - I just know that my retail clients there have often paid for our services through a government grant. I think it's EU money intended to stimulate growth in remote areas.

Right - okay interesting I'll get my Google-fu on

Bristol and Bath are in the M4 corridor.

Out of interest, what sort of employees are you looking to hire at the moment?

Frontend and backend (php7) engineers. Modern stack, aws.

AWS contractor can earn up to 800 per day for a 6 month contract in London at the moment...

Thanks.

Also Brighton is quite nice. Good amount of tech jobs, awesome music/culture scene and it is quite close to London, making it possible to commute daily.

It's good, though the jobs aren't hugely varied, there is quite a lot of php, there used to be a lot of flash (I assume they have moved to JS now).

Techwise a little bit of a monoculture, though maybe that is the same as the rest of the UK?

Thats right, but there is also big game industry around the town and quite some high tech stuff (I used to work for company making embedded databases in aerospace/defence market) and hardware companies.

I live in Cambridge. The price/wage ratio is becoming even worse here.