The North is open for business. And the data is pretty hard to argue with.
New company formation rates across UK regions tell a story that London-centric thinking keeps getting wrong. Strip out the capital and look at what’s actually happened over the past two years: Leeds, Manchester, and Birmingham are registering new companies at a pace that’s closing the gap faster than most analysts expected. The West Midlands alone has seen formation rates climb consistently quarter-on-quarter, driven heavily by professional services, tech-adjacent businesses, and a surprisingly active cohort of under-35 founders.
What’s interesting isn’t just the volume — it’s the sector mix. Northern formations skew younger in terms of company age and leaner in terms of structure. Fewer directors, smaller initial share capital, faster time from incorporation to first filing. These aren’t holding companies or shelf entities. Something is actually being built.
Meanwhile, some areas that looked promising five years ago have quietly plateaued. The East of England’s formation rate, once punchy, has softened. Certain coastal regions that benefited from the post-2020 relocation boom are seeing that momentum fade.
This matters enormously if you’re doing market sizing, prospecting into regional accounts, or tracking where your competitors are quietly building pipeline. The formation data is there — it’s public — but most people aren’t reading it this way.
Borsch.ai pulls formation data across all 5.68 million UK companies, sliced by region, sector, and time period. So instead of relying on vibes and press releases about regional growth, you can see exactly where new business activity is actually concentrating.
Worth a look before your competitors do: https://borsch.ai
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