With effort, I can see the logic: Ferrari is not based in the UK, so a swish British HQ might be a waste of money; the carmaker’s headquarters in the northern Italian town of Maranello, which I’ve visited, have the feel of a giant industrial estate as well; Slough is convenient for London; and the cars speak for themselves in marketing terms.
But the trip got me wondering. Is there another company in Britain where the gap between the prestige of the brand clashes so dramatically against the prosaic reality of its location? Every year sees the publication of “Most Admired Companies”, “Great Places to Work” and “Crap Towns” rankings. But has anyone published a list of Great Companies Based in Improbably Crap British Towns?
It turns out they haven’t. And my initial attempt to compile one, topped by Tesco, which is headquartered in Cheshunt, in Hertfordshire, made it evident why. There’s no way you could publish such a list, subjectively selecting great companies and rubbish towns, without offending half the country.
A second, more scientific attempt to compile rankings raised a number of different problems. I thought I could simply merge the list of the UK’s 50 Best Workplaces, as published by the Great Place to Work Institute this year, with the rankings in Crap Towns II: The Nation Decides — the New Top 50 Worst Places to Live in the UK, awarding companies points according to how highly they were rated as workplaces and where the town of their residence was ranked in Crap Towns II.
But a disproportionate number of companies were based in London, ranked eighteenth in the book; a certain number of towns, such as Uxbridge, didn’t appear in Crap Towns II at all; and in the Best Workplaces list, only the top ten companies were ranked consecutively, the remaining 40 being grouped together.
Nevertheless, having cut some corners, given every Best Workplace below the top ten the position of joint-eleventh, clear winners became evident and I can now name the Official Top Three Great Companies Based in Improbably Crap British Towns, starting with, in third position, Danone, the “world leader in dairy products and bottled water”.
This company topped the 2009 rankings of the UK’s Best Workplaces, for its health programme, dedicated employee training and volunteering programme, but is based in London, described by Crap Towns II as feeding “off the rest of the country like a leech, growing heavier and more ugly by the day” and containing property so expensive that “soon only management consultants and rats will be able to survive there”. It adds: “The only reason so many people live here is because the UK is on a slope like a bad pool table and the economic laws of gravity inevitably lead people to roll down here.”
Silver medal goes to: TDX Group, a debt management company, which was ranked in the Top 50 Best Workplaces for, among other things, its green initiatives, but is based in Nottingham, described by Crap Towns II as a town that has been on “a life support machine since the 1980s” and suffering from “spiralling gun crime, under-performing schools and, for a city that once prided itself on its diverse manufacturing output, absolutely no industry — unless you consider call centres and bar work to be meaningful forms of employment.”
But the accolade of Britain’s Most Improbably Great Company in a Most Notably Crap Town, aside from Ferrari in Slough that is (which, as it happens, topped the 100 Best Workplaces in Europe in 2007), goes to Bigmouthmedia, a self-proclaimed “Search Engine Optimisation and Internet Marketing Specialist New Media Agency”.
It sounds like a truly wonderful place to work, given its open-door policy, zippy internal company newsletter and weekly “mouth-offs” for staff, but is based in Edinburgh, which is ranked fourth in Crap Towns II, being described as “an insufferably smug, small town with an overly keen sense of its own importance . . . overrun by lawyers, financiers and politicians dressed in laughable period costume [tweed!] straight off the pages of an Evelyn Waugh novel.” It adds: “Edinburgh has pockets of poverty and desperation deep enough to make your eyes bleed.” Not my words, I’d like to emphasise. Not my words at all. So no need to send violent letters of complaint to The Times, a mighty newspaper, which, as it happens, is based in Wapping.
sathnam@thetimes.co.uk
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