The Like Minds blog carries an interesting guest post from Jonathan Lister that captures the heart of what makes a city work or not as a start-up hub:

Long before the Government christened it “Tech City” and the likes of Google moved in, Shoreditch has been a village. You walk down the street or into a pub and bump into someone you know; you order an espresso in a hipster café and someone you know is standing in line with you. It’s this village atmosphere, with all the attendant social events and professional intermingling, that pulled me and a lot of people I know to Shoreditch in the first place.

There’s plenty of evidence that these sorts of accidental encounters are great at creating an innovative company culture – we looked at the when Yahoo! brought its remote workers back in house.

It’s interesting to see it happening across a city district. It’s almost like the city is acting as a large, distributed company…