“The biggest surprise to me is the amount of people I see jogging or walking or going to the store by walking, even when it’s cold. It doesn’t change from summer to winter,” he says. “You have people who are eighty years old still out doing their normal walk.”

He’s one of dozens of key employees that have been attracted by the potential of green battery company Northvolt, one of Europe’s most well-funded private companies, to relocate to a former mining town more than 750km from the cosmopolitan luxuries of Stockholm.

On top of the 2,500 employees it has now, another 3,000 will be needed for a new gigafactory and R&D centre in Gothenburg, in southern Sweden, being built alongside Volvo. The company is hiring up to 150 people a month from...