Using company data drawn from Endole and ONS, we’ve analysed the records of over one million active businesses across London and the UK’s 10 most populated cities.
With that much data to cover, it would be almost impossible to share everything in a series of charts or tables, so we’ve created an interactive tool you can explore below.
Our tool shows the number of businesses in the UK’s largest industry groups across each city’s postcode regions – the perfect solution for anyone looking for new business opportunities or considering starting a new business. For those with larger establishments, it could offer insight into the most strategic locations for an office move or the most lucrative options for expansion.
For the best mobile viewing experience, click here.
Where are the UK’s industrial hotspots?
Home to 444,095 businesses operating in the UK’s top 10 industries, London boasts the highest number of companies across each of the top 10 industry groups. Beyond the capital, Manchester leads as the industrial hub in several areas, including real estate, transport and storage, and businesses in professional scientific and technical services.
By comparison, the northern city has the lowest number of businesses in both manufacturing (481 businesses) and wholesale, retail and repairs (1,908 businesses).
The southern city of Bristol triumphs over the manufacturing industry, home to 5,188 businesses in this sector. Glasgow, on the other hand, dominates wholesale, retail and repairs with a total of 10,401 active businesses.
After London, Glasgow could also be considered the “UK capital” for businesses in finance and insurance, with a total of 2,069 active businesses in this field. This industry, however, is among the lowest in the top 10 when it comes to employment, with only 1.4 million UK-wide employees. By comparison, professional, scientific and technical industries – which hold the largest share of business in the UK at 15.6% – employ 2.9 million people.
For a full breakdown of the data, you can view a chart of the number of active businesses in each of the top 10 cities below to discover your local industrial hotspots!
Number of active businesses in the UK’s top 10 cities, by industry
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Sources & Methodology
Company data gathered from ONS and Endole. Population figures from World Population Review. Map visualisation created by Sergiy Puzyrkov. Data gathered relates to registered business addresses, as opposed to trading addresses.
The tool treats “number of businesses” as the number of unique SIC codes listed by active and registered business addresses in each city. The tool collects and maps this data across postcode regions in which there are 10 or more counts of activity.
Analysis and resulting figures have been designed to filter out duplicates in registered business address and company name. In certain cases, a single business might operate in more than one industry; in these instances, the figures account for each individual SIC code listed by a single company. Businesses relating to construction, education and health/social care have been omitted from research.
