For the past few years, London has been at the centre of a fairly relentless narrative of decline.

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We are told that wealth is leaving, talent is drifting abroad and rival cities are catching up.

Some of those pressures are real. London is not an easy city. But if you spend time with founders, investors and the people actually building businesses, you hear a very different story.

They never stopped choosing London.

To many in the startup world, the recent burst of ‘Londonmaxxing’ enthusiasm online is not new. It is simply the wider conversation catching up with what they have been seeing for years: that, despite the noise, London still gives ambitious companies an unusually strong chance of becoming real.

Part of that is because London remains a vibrant, multicultural global city with something for everyone, every day of the week. For founders, that matters more than it might seem. Innovation often happens at the intersection, where different domains of expertise meet, learn from one another and create something new. In many ways, London is a perfect place for that.

The city’s draw also creates something more practical: human capital. London continues to attract smart, mobile and ambitious people from Britain and around the world, which means fast-growing companies can hire highly skilled staff in ways that are often much harder elsewhere. In some ecosystems, big tech companies hoover up the best talent and lock them in with golden handcuffs. London is different. Startups here still have a real chance of finding the people they need.

That advantage is strengthened further by where London sits. Together with Oxford and Cambridge, and its own world-class universities, it forms a tightly connected ecosystem that acts as a magnet for some of the most dynamic people in technology and innovation. The ‘Golden Triangle’ matters not just because of research excellence, though that is a huge part of it, but because it creates a virtuous circle in which one generation of success feeds back into the next through advice, networks and capital.

You can see that in the work. At Mishcon de Reya, where I advise venture investors and emerging companies, we worked on over 180 venture capital investment deals last year. Much of that activity sits within this wider ecosystem. Ideas, research, founders, investors and specialist advisors are clustering here for a reason.

Charlie Fletcher is a Partner at Mishcon de Reya, specialising in M&A, corporate advisory, fundraising and international investment.

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