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The policy models currently employed in British cities to promote urban economic innovativeness and competitiveness echo national policies by being technology-based. Yet the most powerful driver of both UK economic success and regional and urban inequality has been London-based innovation. This does not depend on technological initiatives, but on labour intensive, knowledge-based processes, especially within the financial and business services. This paper examines service-based innovation and competitiveness in the English urban system, dominated by London, and their implications for urban innovation policies. These offer little support to other UK cities in gaining from London's experience of service-led success, or challenging its dominance of innovative tradable services.

ABSTRACT It is often assumed that future urban employment will be increasingly dependent on the knowledge‐intensive business services (KIBS). This underpins much of the current thinking about the development of the English "core cites." Their example is employed to examine the more general validity of such assumptions, in terms of five critical questions to which research offers only partial and indefinite answers. For any city, how far are these activities really "knowledge intensive"? What markets do they serve? Is their future growth certain? And even when this is the case, how can they make a long‐term contribution to local urban economic success? Finally, how far do urban economic institutions and policies need to be adapted to foster knowledge‐based activities such as KIBS? It seems that, despite the growth of measured KIBS employment, most of the core cities possess few truly knowledge‐intensive KIBS, capable of serving national and international business markets, competitively adapting to future change, and adding to the competitiveness of the wider urban economy. Nationally such activities remain focused into the London region where, if anything, they have increased their concentration is recent years.

"The book starts with an account of the arrival of the Pilgrims in Massachusetts in November 1620, which is to say that it endorses a very old idea of the best place to catch the first glimmer of the American republic: 1620, not 1619. I'm well aware that the claims of 1620 have their own weaknesses. The country's "very origin," as the Times puts it, isn't something that can be settled once and for all. Many threads from many origins all eventually cohere into a nation. But there is something vital about 1620 that is worth pointing out and that is increasingly lost to national consciousness in our multicultural age. 1620 is a strong counterpoint to 1619, not just in proximity but in spirit. The rest of the book is best thought of as a voyage of discovery, so I will forego the usual practice of offering an advance tour of the chapters. What will come, will come"--