In our ongoing series on reputation, Brittany Golob charts the development of the British technology industry

Harold Wilson stood in front of the Labour Party Conference at Scarborough in 1963 and declared that Britain needed a revolution. Revolution in the name of capitalism, of democracy and of science, a revolution that would forge a new Britain. “We must use all the resources of democratic planning, all the latent and underdeveloped energies and skills of our people, to ensure Britain’s standing in the world,” he said.

That standing was to be based on science and technology, on thought and reason. It was a continuation of what Alan Turing began at Bletchley Park just 24 years prior and it would proceed 26 years later when Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. Some 19 years on, Wilson’s white heat blazes today from the streets of Shoreditch to the cafes of Cambridge.

Britain’s tech industry is comprised of names like ARM, Vodafone and Telefonica but also those of Graze, Hailo and Flubit. Britain’s version of the 1990s dotcom boom developed along the M4 corridor and the so-called Silicon Fen when Shoreditch was just another amorphous district in London’s neglected east end.

BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan- Jones recalls working on a television programme in 1990 about hi-tech firms spawning from the vast halls of the University of Cambridge. The news team was told that the area required a billion dollar company to act as an anchor. “In the next decade this began to happen – ARM, Autonomy, CSR all became powerful businesses,” Cellan-Jones says.

From its origins in a Cambridge chicken shed, the founders of ARM Holdings knew they were hard-pressed to compete with America’s venture- capital-funded semiconductor culture so they sought to satisfy an unfulfilled need. Thus, ARM developed world-class designs for high-efficiency microprocessors. It has since expanded to 36 countries and over 1,000 partnerships with over 1,000 of the world’s biggest tech firms.

“I really do think that it comes down to not wanting to do it all, not wanting to own the entire end to end process,” marketing director Ellie Springett says about ARM’s growth. “Then there’sroom for value throughout the chain... I think ARM is probably the keystone in that process.”

The dotcom bubble would burst in the early 00s, but ARM, with its strategy of forging ahead through partnerships and communications, avoided the disaster that befell its contemporaries. “Have many of them sold up and become satellites of mainly US firms? Yes, but that’s true elsewhere too,” Cellan- Jones adds. “It has a positive side – small UK tech start-ups have been quick to grasp the need to go global and often that means they need access to the kind of capital only available in the US.”

As the 20th century faded into the 21st, Britain began developing a tech industry that seems quintessentially British. It features cautious investors, who perhaps remember the last time around and provide, but do not pour, capital into the small companies drawn to the cheap real estate in East London. As more entrepreneurs flood Shoreditch, more investment inevitably follows.

The Tech City Investment Organisation (TCIO) emerged to support the community, sponsored by the UK Trade and Investment Organisation (UKTI) to provide both physical and fiscal support to London’s fledgling startup community. The community now includes hundreds of companies jostling for space in an increasingly crowded market. “Location is exceptionally important,” Flubit co-founder Bertie Stephens says. After a move from Newbury, Flubit found a home in the heart of London’s Tech City. The draw of a large community of tech companies attracts developers and investors in droves. “Developers who you wouldn’t be able to get otherwise, flock to this area. We are where the talent is willing to go.”

Adam Keal, director at Fishburn Hedges, says the British tech industry had yet to find its identity at the end of the last millennium. “In the 90s, you had some great British investors and pioneers and technology. You had a great tech scene in the UK, but not a technology industry as such. All the web darlings and the dotcoms were in the US. There were some great innovations coming out of the UK, but it was not known as a tech giant.”

Tech City’s growing global prominence has since turned the ‘Made in Britain’ stamp into a revered concept in technology. “Most people in the UK will recognise the words ‘Tech City’,” Keal adds.

In much the same way that ARM saw a need and filled it a couple of decades ago, Tech City is rife with companies that fill a need, whether they are as niche as Flubit’s provision of group-driven discount shopping or as universal as Moshi Monsters’creation of a safe social network for children. Those companies flourish because of Tech City itself. The community acts as an extended support group. Its job fairs draw thousands of hopefuls and its pubs act as real-life chatrooms for the countless businesses finding their feet in tech entrepreneurship.

Places like Stockholm and Berlin have established technology bases, Gaza and Glasgow boast a startup culture and Kenya will develop the so-called Silicon Savannah by 2030. What makes London different, however is something it has boasted for centuries – the financial industry. Both geographically and economically, the tech startups that crowd the streets of Shoreditch and the country’s signature financial institutions just a few stops away in the City have become part of the same framework.

“Building momentum and a sense of community by physically getting entrepreneurs together is a very powerful thing. But actually getting the key stakeholders, financial institutions, entrepreneurs, highly technological skilled labour and so forth and bringing it together in an urban environment is very interesting,” Antony Ceravolo, co-founder of ECNlive, a company that provides informational and interactive monitors for internal and external office-based communications, says. “What the UK is doing really well is taking the high tech scene that emerged in Cambridge and moving it into the heart of the financial sector.”

Companies like Graze, LOVEFiLM, Hailo, moo. com and others exist partly because of the ease with which Tech City residents have attracted interest from the financial district.

What the UK is doing really well is taking the high tech scene that emerged in Cambridge and moving it into the heart of the financial sector.

Stephens says Tech City is a draw for investors not only for its physical nearness, but also because of its reputation, “Investors don’t mind coming [to Shoreditch]. That’s where the value is in the area. When you say you’re in Old Street, they see you’ve taken the smart step to locate there.” For startups, Tech City’s reputation has at least one very real advantage – an influx of capital.

Tech City’s appeal, however, has seeped beyond the London’s borders; due largely to the success of some of its offspring and the new tech clusters in other countries. The TCIO has become a veritable force in the technology world and has placed a “PR- able” banner on British tech, Keal says.

Mind Candy, whose brainchild Moshi Monsters has taken the under-14s of Britain by storm, has set up shop in Silicon Valley. Julia O’Shaughnessy, chief communications officer, says the excitement surrounding both California’s tech nucleus and London’s attracts employees, capital and passion.“I always knew that there was a tech centre in London but it seems like the last two years it has become a lot more prominent here in the press. We’re recruiting from Silicon Valley to London, five years ago that would have been a hard sell...but now London has that reputation for success.”

Stockholm-based mobile payment company iZettle recently launched in Britain. PR manager Christina Lundberg says the lure of the English market for consumer tech has allowed iZettle’s transition from the continent to run smoothly. While British companies, like Hailo and Moshi Monsters are finding markets overseas, Tech City is also playing a role in attracting businesses to Shoreditch. Over the next few years, Hoxton will play host to an increasing number of international tech superstars, like Google, who plan to take up residence along the Amber Line.

But recognition and reputation cannot and will not conclude with the meteoric marketing success that Tech City has experienced. Cellan-Jones says marketing alone is not enough to sustain a tech industry, “I think the cluster does have some strengths, but it has been overhyped and there’s little evidence of any worldbeating companies being created. If we’re looking for a real rival to Silicon Valley, Cambridge looks more like the real thing.”

Harold Wilson did not only call for a revolution, he called for apprenticeship and for resources and democratic initiatives to endow science and technology with the support and sustenance it needed to be maintained. While the east end’s development is still embryonic, the fens stand as an example of what the most successful of the Tech City startups can do to achieve that.

With its established partnerships, ARM is in the unique position to shape not only the technology in use everyday but also business practice itself. Springett sees the future of ARM lying in thought leadership, “How can we use the values and the structure of the business to help shape how different businesses might operate in the future?”

The Government has pledged a £50 millioninvestment in Tech City this year alone. In a 2010 speech, prime minister David Cameron said, “Our ambition is to bring together the creativity and energy of Shoreditch and the incredible possibilities of the Olympic Park to help make East London one of the world’s great technology centres.” In recognising that the future of the British economy was based in technology, the UKTI and the Government’s investment in the TCIO has helped to establish Britain as a leader in the tech world.

Sustaining that status is another matter.

Keal says education in computer sciences and digital design is key to developing Britain’s latent talent from a young age, “They absolutely have to keep mapping and matching the curriculum from a computer skills point of view.” He points to the Government’s 2012 investment as a signal of intent in supporting the country’s tech industry.

ARM sponsors Code Club, a Duke of York- endowed organisation that runs youth groups that teach kids how to code and is nearing a presence in 5,000 British schools. Springett says the future of British tech rests in young people learning to apply their knowledge of technology to meaningful ends.

For now, though, the industry faces an influx of interest from two disparate camps both with a stake in new technology: creatives and financial analysts.

Decoded, a Tech City startup, teaches creatives the basics of Java, HTML5 and C++. For the communications industry, knowledge of the digital kind is invaluable when developing tech-based communications for clients. “The digital industry is growing four times faster than any other industry in the world,” Decoded’s head of business development Claire Koryczan says. “There are not enough skilled people to satisfy the demand for jobs. There’s a massive shortage of skilled people in the digital space. That’s where the growth is for our economy, the jobs are where the market is growing.”

The Shoreditch migration is also compelling former bankers, consultants and analysts to look to Tech City for employment. “Tech is taking up the slack in the City,” Ceravolo says.

Britain’s tech industry has come a long way, miles in fact, from its origin in the fens and along the M4 to the heart of London’s M25 ring. It has traveled the distance between Wilson’s white heat revolution at the Scarborough Labour party conference in 1963, to coalition leader Cameron’s promotion of Tech City in Shoreditch in 2010. Where the next 50 years of reputation and sector development will take British technology remains uncharted.

What the UK is doing really well is taking the high tech scene that emerged in Cambridge and moving it into the heart of the financial sector.