Austin Wired City

The Texan capital keeps things weird by welcoming high tech, treasuring its small, quirky restaurants and bars, and encouraging a thriving live music scene

- By Jonathan Thompson. Photographs by Ryan J Lane, Istock, Ismael Quintanilla, Carlos Alfonso, Unsplash, Lorraine Boogich and Visit Austin

Weird is one of those words which doesn't translate cleanly from American into British English. In the US, it's less about the odd, peculiar or undesirable; more about the quirky, creative and avant-garde. And Austin - aka Weird City - oozes the latter in spades.

The Texan capital has long been a bastion for the inventive and eccentric; you just need to glance at the profusion of street art, bumper stickers and faded tie-dye t-shirts bearing its ubiquitous slogan - Keep Austin Weird - to see that. But over the last decade, it's become something considerably more: a booming tech mecca with one of the fastest growing populations in the country. Weird City has also become Wired City.

Last year, Elon Musk's Tesla became the latest big name to relocate to Austin, following in the recent footsteps of Apple and Amazon, and joining pre-existing tech titans including Dell, Samsung, IBM and Facebook. The mass exodus to Central Texas - largely from California - has been driven by a number of business-friendly factors, including the affordability of Texan property, the availability of land and the lack of state income tax.

According to the Austin Chamber of Commerce, jobs in high tech have grown by a mind-boggling 62 per cent in the metropolitan area over the last decade, representing more than 175,000 new roles. This dramatic increase, in turn, has given rise to yet another nickname for the city - Silicon Hills: a nod to both the departure from Silicon Valley and the arrival in picturesque Texas Hill Country.

THE BEST OF TEXAN NIGHTLIFE