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The rise in standards and expectations has spread throughout the country. Take Birmingham, which I reached after a long drive from Glasgow via York. Birmingham was previously a symbol of unemployment and urban decay; its center for three decades has been choked by a "concrete collar" of ugly motorways. Now the roads are being moved and bridged, old warehouses have been converted into trendy bars and shops, and the business district is full of cranes building new apartments and visitor attractions.
Or take Aberdeen, capital of the archipelago of wells and pipelines extending 300 km into the North Sea that has made Britain the world's ninth-largest producer of oil and fourth-largest of natural gas. I flew there from Copenhagen, where people know how to live well, and found the Aberdonians were just as good at it. The fancy restaurants were full on a Saturday night. The waiters were Italian and French as well as Scottish. I watched the Scottish Ballet stage a stunning Romeo and Juliet for a sellout crowd. Afterward the younger patrons emerged into a misty evening bound for stylish clubs throbbing with the well-dressed and hormonally charged.
Hamish Grant, founder of an electronics company called Axeon that's developing a microprocessor for next-generation mobile phones, is a former oil executive who uprooted his family from London two years ago. "There's fantastic countryside, I don't have to commute three hours a day, schools are good, so's the culture," he says. "Aber-deen sparkles. It makes you want to stay."
The key factor making Aberdeen attractive to Grant — a trend evident in other growth spots — is its educational base. Things have come a long way since the wartime Minister of Education, R.A. Butler, rejected the idea of adding more applied science to the curriculum by declaring, "if you have had a proper education in Latin, you can take the internal combustion engine in your stride." Britain produces eight times as many university graduates as it did in 1950; while engineers are still too few to meet demand, numbers are growing. No longer do universities look down their noses at business. When Grant searched for laboratory discoveries to commercialize, the University of Aberdeen "was very open and helpful, and introduced us to some key academics who were interested in our proposition," he says.
Aberdeen is still not in Cambridge's league as a new business incubator, but there are now local venture capitalists and business angels who are crucial to turning a gaggle of new firms into a self-sustaining network. Ironically, the slump in oil prices between 1997 and 1999 has also contributed to the city's entrepreneurial buzz. When the oil companies downsized, a lot of the newly unemployed formed small firms to exploit what they had learned about mapping, simulations and process control.
John Sinclair, a burly, fast-talking man whose mobile phone rings constantly, used to supervise undersea work on oil platforms and pipelines. Eighteen months ago he started CNS, a company that digs undersea trenches for fiber-optic cables, a booming business as telecom firms scramble for more bandwidth. Sinclair already has $15 million in annual sales and plans to book a specialized ship for a five-year charter. "There's a lot of good-quality engineers in Aberdeen just now," he says, "and they're all available."
Maybe not for long: at more than $30 a barrel, oil is coming back too. The major oil companies recently announced plans to invest $4 billion in the North Sea next year. But a lot of this investment turns out to depend on the new economy, because technological advances are making it possible to exploit fields once considered too small.
I helicoptered to the Anasuria, a ship 175 km east of Aberdeen operated by Shell, to see how those advances are being applied to satisfy our undimming addiction to fossil fuels. It's a floating oil and gas production platform that can be towed cheaply from one small field to another. Pipelines from four different wells up to 12 km away join the ship through an elegantly designed turret in the bow, firmly anchored to the seabed by kilometer-long cables. Because the ship swings freely around the turret, there's no need for engines or fuel to keep its position fixed, helping to keep operating costs below $1.50 a barrel (more than 60 million have been pumped so far).
Most of the crew have worked on the ship since it was launched four years ago. To drive costs down further, many have been "multiskilled," like the crane driver who is also a mechanic and helicopter landing officer. Stuart Fowles, a process technician and 20-year North Sea veteran, says the workload of the fanatically safety-conscious crew often requires them to extend their 12-hour shifts. "Sometimes I wish for a few extra bodies," he says. But if all the platforms in the North Sea get linked by fiber-optic cable, as some oil companies are considering, even fewer people will call the Anasuria home: some of the process control work could be shifted onshore.
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