The UK map: where the firms actually are
Available registered office addresses from the UK dataset, pinned to an interactive UK map: 80 office rows that plot, 53 in London and 27 elsewhere in the UK, plus eleven entities with no separately filed registered-office address. A scoping note: the canonical catalogue used across this series is ~90 active firms; the 80 plotted rows here include a few separately registered brand entities sharing one address (the three A&M LLPs, Capital Economics' two companies, the two ECA names) and one dissolved firm, Vivid Economics, retained for continuity, so the map plots slightly fewer distinct active firms than the headline catalogue, while the eleven non-plotting entities sit in the dataset but never appear on this registered-office map.
Most of the industry sits in London, but some of it is elsewhere. Plot the available registered offices and two things come into focus at once: the tight London clusters that form the core of the market, and a thinner scattering of firms working out of Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, and a handful of regional towns. The London map is not one cluster but four, and the four clusters do not overlap so much as they face different clients through different doors; each postcode has its own logic. The logic is partly geographical. Walk the streets and you can often read the business model from the building.
Cluster 1: the Square Mile (EC2, EC3, EC4). Here live the litigation and disputes firms, a trove of expert-witness outfits packed into a few square blocks. FTI Consulting sits on Aldersgate Street. A&M Europe, A&M Tax and A&M Disputes share 30 Old Bailey. Brattle Group occupies 100 Wood Street; CRA International, 8 Finsbury Circus; NERA, the St Botolph Building on Houndsditch; BRG UK, 8 Salisbury Square. Much of it fits inside a ten-minute walk, and the cluster sits close to the Royal Courts of Justice and the Commercial Court. If your business is expert-witness testimony, you want to be a short cab ride from the bench; on this map, this is one of the densest clusters.
Cluster 2: the City fringe (EC2A, EC2M, EC2N), the competition and strategy boutiques. RBB Economics keeps its rooms at 199 Bishopsgate, on the EC2M edge of the Square Mile; Frontier Economics is at Worship Square on Clifton Street, EC2A, on the Shoreditch fringe. Different postcodes from the disputes shops to the south, but the same five-minute Tube ride to the Royal Courts of Justice and to UCL, LSE and SOAS, the academic reservoirs these firms draw on, one stop further west on the Central Line. If you are a competition economist giving evidence to the CMA one morning and briefing a Linklaters partner on a merger case the next, the City fringe is the logical postcode.
Cluster 3: Victoria and Westminster (SW1). The policy shops and the political advisers sit within sight of Whitehall, which fits a client base that includes government departments. Baringa Partners occupies 62 Buckingham Gate; Capital Economics sits at 100 Victoria Street; Independent Economics takes 15 Whitehall itself. For Flint Global, being a three-minute walk from HM Treasury is not decorative; it is part of the product.
Cluster 4: the West End (W1). The macro research houses. Macro Advisory Partners at 4 Albemarle Street. The cluster is small but the addresses are deliberate: Mayfair is where the hedge funds and asset managers keep their desks, and the macro firms want to be within easy reach of the subscribers who pay them.
Outside London, 27 firms across the country. The biggest names sit in Oxford. Oxera Consulting LLP keeps its registered office at Park Central on Park End Street, a two-minute walk from Oxford railway station; Oxford Economics Ltd sits on St Aldates; AFRY Management Consulting, the Swedish-owned energy-regulation practice, is registered a few doors down; SQW Ltd, the innovation-policy consultancy, works out of the Oxford Centre for Innovation on Alfred Street. Four of the 27 non-London firms share the same Oxford cluster. It is the one corner of the UK where an economics-consulting agglomeration has actually taken hold outside the capital.
Cambridge has one: Cambridge Econometrics Ltd on Covent Garden, the Cambridge street, not the London one. Edinburgh has BiGGAR Economics Ltd on Shandwick Place; Glasgow has EKOS Consulting (UK) Ltd; Newcastle has Pantheon Macroeconomics Ltd; Liverpool has AMION Consulting Ltd; Birmingham has Warwick Economics & Development; Leeds has York Aviation LLP. The rest are scattered across residential addresses in Kent, Surrey, Greater Manchester, Nottingham, Newbury and Harrogate, one- and two-person boutiques for which the registered office is simply the founder's front room.
Now go global: which firms share a city with whom
Leaving the UK-only view behind: a force-directed graph of the 45 firms with a tracked international footprint. An edge appears when two firms operate from at least N of the same cities worldwide, N set by the slider in the sidebar.
The officer graph in NOTE H was organised around people flow: who has shared a director or LLP member with whom. Compass Lexecon sat near the middle of that picture because the documented move set records two decades of staff movement across the rest of the cluster. This note swaps the edge definition. Here a line exists whenever two firms keep offices in at least three of the same cities, it is a map of where the firms physically overlap, not who they share.
The hub changes. In this office-location file, the firms with the most physical overlap are the ones with broad office footprints; Alvarez & Marsal, Ankura, Compass Lexecon, Oxford Economics and the Big 4 economics practices gravitate to the middle. The small boutiques, DotEcon, Europe Economics, Credo, WIK-Consult, Bates White, Cebr, Fathom, orbit the rim with one or two edges each, and some appear isolated in the network view.
| Rank | Firm | Offices | Edges | Max overlap |
|---|
Where the global firms actually are
The same 45 firms from the network above, now pinned to a world map. Dot size = number of firms present in the city. Curves = HQ→office corridors, thicker when multiple firms share the same route.
The network graph shows structural overlap; the map below shows geography. Taken together they settle a question the chord diagram in Part 7 could not quite answer: is the overlap real, or is it just London? Filter by a single category or a single firm, and watch the dots redistribute across the map in real time.
The dashed lines and hollow dots on the map pick out one particular structural wrinkle. The Economist Intelligence Unit operates four branded offices of its own, London, New York, Hong Kong, Dubai, but services clients from a further 12 cities through the broader Economist Group network: Washington DC, Chicago, Los Angeles, Brussels, Frankfurt, Geneva, Paris, Johannesburg, Singapore, Tokyo, Shanghai, Mumbai. The network graph treats all 16 cities as presence for edge-counting because the EIU's published footprint presents that reach to clients; the map distinguishes the two categories so the reader can see which cities have an EIU office and which are access through a parent network.