I totally empathise with this. When I'm looking for work I see lots of firms in London hiring, but I have no interest in moving there, and although commuting is just about doable for the very short term, it totally ruins my out of work life. I would happily work remotely, but no one ever offers this.
I'm not sure I quite understand the obsession companies have with London. There are plenty of talented people around the rest of the country.
I can understand the obsession. As pointed out, the UK is massively centralized around a single city. Media ? London. Finance ? London. Politics ? London. And so on. There may be local centers of excellence elsewhere - and devolution has been an improvement - but if your startup relies on, for example, shmoozing clients or investors in the media or finance sectors, then London is where you want to be.
Personally, I think that's one thing (well that and our antiquated infrastructure and class system) that's holding the UK back, and it didn't used to be the case. But that's the situation we have.
However, there is no reason why people who don't need to shmooze with clients need to live in London or the Home Counties. If your job is coding, then remote working is a viable - and cheap - option, with the occasional company meeting every other month. A lot of companies have a lot of success with this model and, well-managed, it works well.
I think a lot of startups are still attached to some "Social Network" romantic ideal of a hackers' playground where we sit in Aeron chairs and eat pizza doing all-night coding sprints in between Nerf gun fights. However that has absolutely nothing to do with success or failure of a software project. A startup needs to adapt and economize and a huge office in central London is hardly the best way to do either. First, you are paying through the nose for office space you don't need, and second, it's hard to get people to work for you.
That spells out perfectly the recipe needed for a fast-moving innovative risktaking startup - the pizza, the schmoozing, the all-nighters.
Working remotely and meeting a couple times a month? Preposterous in the startup environment. We're talking Agile daily standups, sharing screens and keyboards during all-nighters, doing a pitch at an hour's notice, recruiting in the coffee shop.
Its fine to contract remotely, perhaps be a peripheral player in a startup, but to be an employee, much less a founder, there's no way to do it half-way.
There are various reasons, but one of the big one is because the talent pool isn't large enough in most places.
It's hard to get someone to move to London for a job, but it's even harder to get someone to move to a smaller city, so you get much more restricted to the local talent pool.
You see hubs of companies around university towns with good CS programs (Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol, Edinburgh) as universities draw talent in from a wider area, but for most cities there simply aren't enough people in a concentrated area.
I live in (near) a smaller city (70,000) with a University. We have a vigorous startup landscape.
There is no monopoly on brains in a large city. In fact, as my Aunt Kate used to say, Honey attracts Flies. Big cities have a disproportionate share of not-so-good players. In smaller towns you can only stay if you're employable, have a modicum of skills.
Still, there's many other drawbacks - scarce investment, more difficult to find markets, absolutely bounded set of talent, hiring inertia (folks tend to stick to their job).
I'm not sure I quite understand the obsession companies have with London. There are plenty of talented people around the rest of the country.