Why Netflix, Google and Microsoft Chose This City to Build the Future of Storytelling
- Luke Loveridge
- Mar 1
- 3 min read
Netflix. Google. Microsoft. Three of the most valuable companies on the planet.
When they chose a partner to help build the future of creative technology, they chose a programme anchored in Bath. A city of 100,000 people in the West of England. Better known for Roman ruins and Regency drama than artificial intelligence.
So why here? The answer is 2,000 years in the making.
A 2,000-Year Head Start
In 70 AD, the Romans built something remarkable here. Not just a bath house - a gathering place for the entire empire. Generals, merchants, emperors. Decisions that shaped the ancient world were made in these waters.
They understood something that still holds today: put the right people in the right environment, remove hierarchy, and something different happens in the conversation.
Fast forward to the 1700s. Beau Nash turned Bath into Britain's most fashionable city - essentially inventing modern social networking. He created structured settings where aristocrats and merchants mixed as equals, where who you knew mattered as much as where you came from.
Jane Austen lived here from 1801 to 1805. Both Northanger Abbey and Persuasion are set here. The Assembly Rooms - where reputations were made and futures decided - are depicted as the engine of Georgian social life.
Bath has always understood the power of the right room.
MyWorld and the Creative Corridor
Which brings us to MyWorld. A £30 million programme from UK Research and Innovation, with £16 million more from over 30 partners - including the BBC, Aardman, BT, and four universities. Challenge partners include Netflix, Google, Microsoft and AWS.
Its mission: to build the future of creative technology in the West of England.
At its heart is CAMERA - the University of Bath's research centre for performance capture, virtual production and AI creative tools. Already working with 20 global partners before MyWorld existed, CAMERA is now building the technical infrastructure that will define how the next generation of stories get made.
One project exemplifies what this looks like in practice. Distortion Creative Group, in partnership with CAMERA, is pioneering volumetric capture for virtual production - a technique that captures three-dimensional moving objects for use in virtual and extended reality environments. It is an R&D gap the entire industry is waiting to see filled.
This is a deliberate ecosystem building infrastructure for what storytelling becomes next.
The University Engine
But creative technology is only part of the story. Bath's universities have spent decades building something broader - a culture of turning serious research into serious companies.
The University of Bath is a founding member of SETsquared - a partnership between five leading UK universities that the Financial Times ranks as the number one university start-up hub in the UK and Ireland. In 2024 alone, spinouts from the partnership raised £273 million in investment, double the previous year.
What does that look like beyond the headline? Naturbeads developed biodegradable microspheres made from cellulose to replace polluting microplastics, raising £7.8 million in funding. EnsiliTech is making vaccines stable at room temperature by encasing them in silica - eliminating the cold chain problem that costs lives across the developing world.
Bath Spa University, meanwhile, co-leads MyWorld's experimental productions strand - the storytelling heart of the programme - where a music producer and a computer scientist work in the same room on something neither can fully define yet.
Engineering rigour and creative experimentation. Most places have one. Bath has both.
A City Worth Staying In
There is one more dimension that matters, particularly for the founders and business leaders this city increasingly attracts.
Bath is Britain's only city with dual UNESCO World Heritage status, recognised for both its Roman remains and its Georgian architecture. The same waters the Romans engineered for connection are still flowing today. Thermae Bath Spa sits directly above the original Roman source.
75 minutes from London. Consistently ranked among the UK's best cities to live. A food scene, a cultural calendar, and an architecture that shapes how people think.
For founders and executives, Bath offers something harder to find than a good meeting room: the clarity that comes from stepping out of the noise. The Romans knew it. Beau Nash built a city on it.
The Bigger Picture
From Roman generals making decisions in thermal waters, to Georgian entrepreneurs engineering the world's first networking infrastructure, to AI researchers building the future of storytelling - Bath has never been content to be a backdrop.
Netflix, Google and Microsoft didn't choose this region by accident. Neither does anyone who takes the time to understand what this city has quietly been building for 2,000 years.
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