Recently , my colleague Gary Watson did a language training course for LKF, a housing company in Lund in the south of Sweden. As part of the training, I rang up each of the participants and asked them to explain a little about the housing market in their area.

My mental picture of Lund is a green, slightly sleepy university town, not dissimilar to Oxford and Cambridge. Lots of students on bicycles, lively coffee bars etc. Lund University is one of the oldest in the country.

Founded in 1666, it was an attempt to re-Swedify Skåne. The southern part of Sweden had been under Danish control until the Treaty of Roskilde. Fans of Kurt Wallander will know that the Swedish spoken down there sounds far more like Danish than the posh version we speak in Stockholm.

The university may be ancient but it is certainly cutting edge when it comes to technology. The LKF people explained to me about a massive new research building project: the MAX IV Lab and the ESS (European Spaliation Source). A spanking new, next-generation, synchrotron radiation facility and a new, state-of-the-art European facility for materials research that are currently being built.

The local community are very excited about this project. It will bring a lot of new jobs to the area and attract top class researchers from all over the world. I drove past the area last summer and was very impressed by the futuristic design, but at that point had no idea what it was. Now I do and I’m even more impressed.

You can read more about it on the university website:

http://www.lunduniversity.lu.se/research-innovation/max-iv-and-ess

In the capital they may be loathe to admit it, but the area around the Öresund Bridge is one of the most dynamic in Sweden these days.