Original post by Patrick Kingsley via guardian.co.uk 

A busy junction in east London surrounded by low-rent offices doesn’t look as if it could rival Silicon Valley. But could its small-scale startups be the key to Britain’s economic recovery?

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.

While the rest of the economy flatlines, Silicon Roundabout – or Tech City, as the government recently branded it – is booming, with new companies arriving nearly every week. “So let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel.” Perry and I are on our way to the Silicon Drinkabout, a get-together for anyone connected to the tech scene, hosted every week by a different local bar. Perry is here because he has just founded his own startup, BandApp, which creates app-building software for aspiring musicians. As a rocker-turned-techie, his presence seems apt. Everyone here is keen to tell  me how the CEO of a tech startup is today’s equivalent of a 60s rock star. So keen, in fact, that it becomes the cliche of the evening.

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