By land area the South West is the largest of England's nine official regions. It runs from Gloucestershire and Wiltshire down through Bristol, Somerset and Dorset to Devon, Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, and its cities include Bristol, Bath, Exeter, Gloucester, Plymouth, Salisbury, Truro and Wells. Much of it is rural: dairy farming on the clay vales, arable land on the chalk downs such as Salisbury Plain, and sheep on the limestone of the Mendips and Cotswolds. The region is known well beyond its borders for Cheddar cheese, cream teas and cider.
Alongside that rural economy sit some of the country's most specialised industries. The Bristol and Bath area lists aerospace, creative media, fintech, life sciences, quantum technologies and space among its sectors. Plymouth employs more people in the marine sector than any other local authority area in the country and is home to Devonport, the largest naval base in western Europe. On the Somerset coast, Hinkley Point C is building two nuclear reactors, the first of a new generation of power stations in Britain, with jobs and apprenticeships reaching across Somerset and beyond.
Tourism ties much of the region together. Cornwall alone has around three hundred miles of coastline, walked by many on the South West Coast Path, and visitors come for beaches, gardens, food and festivals as well as the cathedral cities further east. The result is a region where an engineering supplier near Bristol, a dairy business in Somerset and a holiday-let company in Cornwall may all need better software in the same year, for completely different reasons.