The new technology center that’s West of London

The FT reports that Microsoft are looking to set its new head office out of London to West or East. I will be travelling in to London on the Queen Elizabeth Line from Slough.  I will pass through through suburbs to London that have been derided for decades since Betjeman called the German bombers in to drop their bombs and obliterate,

But like so much of the change in Britain, the change in towns, villages and parts of a great city are being transformed by technology. Slough is the greatest Data Centre in Europe and Microsoft needs data centres to develop here as it has in California.

What if Microsoft came to Slough, or Reading? Would that wake Britain up to the possibility that we might just be on the brink of a technology revolution that could make us the envy of our recently disassociated Europe?

Might our mighty pension schemes that now spurn Britain for California’s magnificent seven, recognise that Britain is the future for their technology on this side of the pond?

I don’t write with much finesse , Slough does not do finesse, not even the lower Slough that is Eton! But we have the water to cool the Data Centres. That water is from the Thames , the electricity that powers the centres is carried to the Thames Valley by our National Grid, people travel across this technological hatching ground using the new Queen Elizabeth Line.

I feel for Berkshire and Oxfordshire and greater London an excitement that I hope is being felt in and around Manchester and in the North East with Britain stretching beneath its bed clothes and awakening again after a sleep of some decades.

Yesterday out stock market hit a new high

When I am not in Eton, I am in the City , living beside Paternoster Square and our Stock Market.

We are on the edge of March; a month when spring begins, when Cheltenham happens, when we go to Edinburgh; this year I will go the Pensions UK investment conference with a determination to “GET REAL” (Torsten Bell).

The largest inhabited castle in the world stares out at me as the morning dawns. It is across the Thames, with its water. It still carries the King’s flag above it, nothing can stop our monarchy, older than Windsor Castle but housed beside Slough, served by the Queen Elizabeth Line and maybe soon a neighbour to Microsoft!