Plenty of culture isn't gigs and nightclubs - London isn't terribly good, for its population size and economy, for those anyway.

Think museums, parks, galleries, theatre, exhibitions.

Granted it's not the only city with those, the problem the UK has is that its small, desirable cities are unable to grow or reinvent themselves. Cambridge and Bristol should be ideal for hardware startups, but the cost of both housing and working space is insane for small, provincial cities, partly because NIMBYism and partly because building infrastructure is absurdly expensive when you're constantly having to work around 200 year old buildings and 800yo city plans.