Corrales is not alone in sensing the stirrings of a tech boom — not just on Tyneside, but across northern England. The economist Douglas McWilliams studied the growth of the digital economy in America and identified three factors crucial to success: a highly skilled workforce, cheap housing and a sense of cultural buzz.

 

The Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR), founded by McWilliams, has ranked every region in Britain according to these factors. Newcastle upon Tyne came first, making it Britain’s equivalent of Nashville — the fastest-growing tech hub in the US, measured by the growth in jobs over the past five years, according to the CEBR.

 

Hot on its heels were a number of other northern cities (Manchester in second, Liverpool fourth) leaving London’s start-up strongholds in the boroughs of Hackney and Islington trailing in their wake.

 

The CEBR expects 70% of the growth over the next five years in the digital and media sector — christened the Flat White Economy by McWilliams in his 2015 book of the same name — to be outside London, with much of it in the north. By 2022, McWilliams predicts, the sector will employ more than 600,000 people in the Northern Powerhouse area, roughly double today’s figure and 50% higher than the total for London.

 

Looking at Tyneside, he has a point. The northeast saw the sharpest regional increase in the number of digital tech businesses in 2011-15, according to a separate study by Tech City UK, the government-backed industry body.

 

“The north of England is going to become the jobs centre of the digital economy,” said McWilliams.

 

 

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