Science and high tech - the reality

Abstract

I should like to begin by telling a story - a high-tech 'success story'. It is a story about a region in Britain. For those of you who know Britain, the region is that swathe of semi-rurality called the Outer Home Counties. It starts somewhere around Cambridge and sweeps around north of London, takes off from Heathrow Airport and goes down westwards towards the Bristol Channel. These days it is called 'the sunbelt', but that has got absolutely nothing to do with its climate, which very rarely sees the sun. This region is called the sunbelt because it is here that British sunrise industries have mainly chosen to locate. Only a few decades ago this was a sleepy place. There were a few bits of manufacturing activity. There was a big railway engineering works, there was a biscuit factory, there were some R and D defence establishments. But basically it was a relatively quiet, minding- its-own-business, agricultural-type region. It is the Today it is Britain's boom area. success story of British geography. It has an enormously high rate of growth of new employ- It is employment which is high status.