If the world is watching the North, are we giving it something worth looking at?

A few years ago, if you’d asked me where the UK’s biggest business stories came from, I would probably have pointed south.

London was where the investment happened, where the journalists were, where the policymakers were, and crucially, where businesses went when they wanted to become national brands rather than regional ones.

But I’m not convinced that’s true in 2026. Over the past few weeks alone we’ve seen Andy Burnham become Prime Minister, Manchester tipped to host the G20, and another wave of investment and attention directed towards the North. Whatever the industry, it feels like there’s a growing recognition that some of the UK’s most exciting businesses aren’t being built inside the M25.

I was talking about this recently with The Times, having spent my career working in both London and Manchester, and it made me think about how much the conversation has changed. For years, we talked about the North-South divide largely in terms of what the North was missing: investment, infrastructure, talent, opportunity, attention. There are obviously still very real disparities, and I’m not suggesting those have disappeared overnight, but I do think the idea that ambitious businesses need to gravitate towards London to be taken seriously is becoming increasingly difficult to defend.

In many ways, the opportunity has already moved. The question now is whether businesses are making the most of it.

The North doesn’t have a visibility problem anymore

One of the biggest things I’ve noticed since moving back to Manchester is just how many exceptional businesses exist almost unnoticed.

Not unnoticed by their customers or competitors, of course. Many are thriving, creating jobs, exporting around the world and quietly building businesses that are genuinely world-class. But step outside their immediate sector and the recognition often disappears remarkably quickly.

For years, we’ve spoken about the North as though the biggest challenge was attracting investment or convincing people to look beyond London. Increasingly, I don’t think that’s true.

Just look at what’s happened over the past few years. Manchester has become one of Europe’s fastest-growing tech ecosystems, while global firms have continued to expand their presence in the city. The prospect of the G20 coming to Manchester next year would put it at the centre of global political and media attention, while investment continues to flow into innovation, transport and infrastructure across the wider region.

And it isn’t just a tech story. Across the North, there are businesses doing genuinely significant things in financial and professional services, manufacturing, property and infrastructure, energy, life sciences and countless other industries. The old idea of the Northern economy as somehow adjacent to the “real” UK business economy feels increasingly absurd.

The problem, in my opinion, is that too many Northern-born organisations still talk about themselves in terms of products, services and company news, when the far more interesting story is the impact they’re having. They’re shaping industries, solving problems that affect millions of people, creating jobs, driving innovation and contributing to the UK economy, yet that context is often completely absent from the way they communicate.

There’s a certain Northern modesty to that which I actually quite like. You get on with the work rather than spending all your time telling everyone how brilliant you are. But there comes a point where being the best-kept secret in your industry stops being endearing and starts becoming a commercial disadvantage. Particularly now, when there are more people paying attention.

The way people form an opinion of your business has changed

This is the other part of the conversation I think businesses need to get their heads around.

We’ve spent years putting communications into very neat boxes. PR was about getting journalists to write about you. SEO was about appearing on Google. Social belonged to the marketing team. LinkedIn was somewhere for the CEO to post occasionally (usually after being reminded three times). Influencer marketing was something consumer brands did.

Those distinctions make increasingly little sense when you think about how people actually research a business today.

If I hear about a company I don’t know, I might Google it, but I’m just as likely to ask ChatGPT or Claude, look at what its leadership team is saying on LinkedIn, see which journalists or industry voices have mentioned it, read what customers think, or look at the conversations it is associated with. Most of us move between those things without even really thinking about it.

That matters enormously for businesses with complicated products, long sales cycles and multiple people involved in buying decisions. You’re unlikely to win somebody over because they saw one brilliant piece of coverage or one LinkedIn post. Their impression of you is being built over weeks or months, across search results, media coverage, social content, recommendations, events, analyst conversations and, increasingly, whatever an AI model tells them when they ask.

So I don’t think communications has necessarily become more complicated. I think it has become much more connected, and businesses need to start treating it that way.

This is where I think Northern businesses have a real opportunity

If more investors, policymakers, journalists and international businesses are looking north, the answer isn’t simply to shout louder about being Northern.

The businesses that make the most of this moment will be the ones that can connect what they are doing here to a much bigger story. If you’re creating hundreds of skilled jobs, what does that say about the future of your industry? If you’re developing new technology, what problem are you solving for the UK economy? If you’re investing in infrastructure, manufacturing or energy, where do you fit into the conversations happening in Westminster and internationally?

That is a much more interesting story than another company milestone or product announcement, and it gives people a reason to care about your business even if they will never buy from you.

It matters commercially too. If you want to attract investment, recruit brilliant people, influence policymakers, win major customers or expand internationally, being good at what you do is only part of the job. The people making those decisions need to understand why you matter, and ideally they need to have formed that impression long before you walk into the room.

For me, that is where the conversation about the North needs to go next. We’ve spent years asking how we attract more attention, investment and opportunity away from London. I think we’re entering a period where much more of that attention is already here, and Manchester in particular has an opportunity to be on the national and international stage in a way it hasn’t been for a long time.

The challenge is what we do with it. There will always be something slightly uncomfortable, particularly for us Northerners, about telling a bigger story about ourselves. Nobody wants to become the person at the party who only talks about how successful they are.

But there’s a fairly sizeable gap between bragging and allowing genuinely impressive businesses to remain virtually invisible outside their own industries. If the eyes of the country, and actually the world, are going to be on the North, this feels like a pretty good time to close it.