Nottingham: Creating the Creative City?

Last year, I did an interview with Adam Bird, the Chief Technology Officer of the Nottingham-based technology company Esendex, and Toby Reid, the former civil engineer and one-time entrepreneur who is now director at BioCity Nottingham.
The interview centred around a discussion of Nottingham’s nascent tech community, exploring the kind of people and businesses who make it tick, and seeking to understand the kind of lifestyle and environment that encourages people like them to put down roots in a particular place.
At the time, the geeks and techies were feeling a bit unloved, as if Nottingham’s leaders were too busy wondering where the next office block might come from to notice that they had the potential gold dust that is knowledge and intellectual property growing under their very noses.
Since then, they’ve got noticed. Esendex was one of the first businesses to become part of the Invest in Nottingham’s Club’s creative class, a group of poster boys and girls for the emerging knowledge-based business community.
It’s the way of news that not all the work you put into a story makes it into print, and one of the shortcomings of the article was the omission of another interview I did to get an informed ‘outside’ perspective on what Nottingham needed to do to nurture and grow more creatives.
The interview was with Lucy Marcus, the American-born (but UK domiciled) technology investment consultant who is also a sought-after commentator on business and business ethics. She’s known to quite a few people in Nottingham through her links with BioCity’s investment fund.
I came across my notes again the other day, and what leapt out during the conversation with her was the answer she gave to the question of what the city’s authorities should be doing to support its creative class.
I’ll let the original unpublished article below do the talking. It’s something not just for creatives and technology companies to dwell on, but also Nottingham City Council, which is still working on its Economic Growth Strategy.
Put simply, it should think extremely carefully before it makes any commitment to create growth itself. And may be it should pick up the phone and give Lucy a call.
Here’s the article, see what you think – feedback would be welcome.


Lucy P. Marcus has long experience of the difficulties businesses face when they try to get recognition for creative original thinking.
The chief executive of Marcus Venture Consulting, she advises early stage technology companies on the best way to connect with venture capital. She also chairs the Mobius Life Sciences Fund at BioCity.
Marcus also has a unique perspective on the Nottingham economy. Born in the USA, she was a high flyer who worked for the US Government before coming to the UK.
Her verdict on the city’s emerging creative community is that it’s an important part of the Nottingham economy – but must find its own way ahead.
“I think one thing that would puzzle me a little is why it would be a big thing for them to get the city on board,” she told Business Post.
“A creative entrepreneurial spirit and the eco-support system for it is not something which can be engineered. It just happens.
“The lifestyle around it is important, the universities can feed into the development of it, but its development will tend to be organic rather than structured. Entrepreneurs are all about doing it themselves.”
Marcus says the sector must have some momentum and “density” if Nottingham is going to become recognised by potential financial backers as a centre for the growth of creative technological businesses. “It’s got to be obvious that there is a lot going on here,” she says.
Nationally, talk about the growth of creative business has been made fashionable by a cluster of web-based technology businesses in London’s Shoreditch that have become collectively known as Silicon Roundabout.
“People were priced out of London and they found a place with cheap rents and good facilities where creatives could gather,” says Marcus.
“Nottingham has got the DNA to make this happen. We have the universities, we have the graduates. If we make it attractive for them to stay, if there are companies for them to work for, then they will stay.
“But if it’s going to happen it will happen naturally – you can’t manufacture a sector through city policy.”

I’m going to revisit this issue from time to time, because it’s an important one. In the meantime I’d also recommend those who are interested in this kind of thing sample a couple of chunky pieces of brain-food.
One is Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class, the book which was probably the first serious analysis of this new breed. It first came out years ago, but is well worth revisiting for first principles.
The second is a more recent tome, urban economist Edward Glaeser’s The Triumph of the City. This, I think, raises some really big questions about the way Nottingham views itself and the world it’s part of.

Champagne, chips and property development

The buildings I like most are those that instantly leave you in awe, that say something about the world they are part of. As a kid, I used to see Nottingham’s domed Council House as a symbol of civic grandeur, and stepping on to the platform at St Pancras inspires a similar feeling.
Particularly so yesterday, as a part of the station’s landmark hotel was turned into a suburb of Nottingham for the evening. The Invest in Nottingham’s Club’s London event attracted an audience of approaching 200 people, many of them connected to the city’s development industry, some outsiders who had been invited to hear what we have to offer.
I spent the evening chasing people whose badges didn’t have the red dots which picked them out as club members or Nottinghamians of one sort or another. Why? Well, the can-do approach of Club members was great to see but it’s the impact this has on those outsiders that determines whether they will do what the club’s name suggests.
The responses I got will be explored in some detail in next Tuesday’s Business Post, but they were broadly mixed – not in a negative sense, but in that they thought Nottingham was absolutely right to chase investment but could not buck a universally tough market. Impressed as they were by some very slick presentations of large-scale development, they wanted to know that in a difficult climate Nottingham’s planners would do everything possible to make sure that red tape did not make an already tough process frustratingly slow or expensively pointless.
At the moment, development money is heavily biased towards London and the South East, where a stronger economy is delivering more obvious opportunities for investors and financiers who remain risk-averse. So anything which makes it more difficult to operate in the provinces won’t help change that.
Nottingham’s new director of corporate development, David Bishop, was in the audience rather than on the podium, though he spent a lot of time quietly chatting to people. But his voice and his department’s approach to planning and development will need to be heard soon.
In the meantime all praise for St Pancras, a fabulous building whether you are arriving from Nottingham or Paris. I can certainly recommend the Champagne bar, where a fine non-vintage went down remarkably well with a bowl of chips.
So well they should just call it The Nottingham Special on the menu.