Tech City: the magic roundabout

It's Friday evening, it has just gone seven, and I am walking towards a lift with the Bloodhound Gang's Adam Perry. "Do it now!" he sings as he bangs some imaginary drums, and launches into The Bad Touch, the Gang's most famous track. "You and me, baby," he posits, "ain't nothing but mammals."

We are in the heart of Shoreditch, east London, a few blocks away from the traffic junction that joins Old Street with City Road. For decades, this was just the ugly Old Street roundabout. Since 2009, it has been coined the Silicon Roundabout, supposedly Britain's answer to California's tech-centric Silicon Valley. Three years ago, the area housed only a dozen digital startups. Now there are at least 300 – and that's a conservative estimate. Last.fm is based here, as are SoundCloud and TweetDeck, which was recently bought by Twitter for £25m. It was a sale that made the tech world sit up and listen.    More Read