As much as there is an aesthetic link between the berlin sound and early dubstep, the croydon lot weren't listening to lots of basic channel and stuff at the time.

The UK scene has its own independent subbass heritage. People in the london scene at least aren't generally that aware of what comes out of europe, especially back in the web 1.0 era we're talking about.

Check out this from 2000: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doMX6su9Ue0

And this from 95: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjQZxMoF8Kc

Both pure london sounds.

Burial in particular was already doing that sound without having ever having heard of basic channel, until kode9 showed it to him.

http://blackdownsoundboy.blogspot.co.uk/2006/03/soundboy-bur...

Also living next to hardwax doesn't qualify you to know about tunes. My mum used to live near blackmarket and she hasn't got any dubs at all.

EDIT: Also technically the R&S lot took that sound from english people like Mad Professor in the 80s :P

It comes about because the genre names describe the scene more than the music. There may be only relatively small (to an outsider) aesthetic differences between, say, progressive house and UKG, if you go to raves where each is played you will find the people playing and dancing to it are completely different, with almost no crossover. The racial makeup will be different, the age, social class, the drugs being used, the clothes worn.

That's why people differentiate dance music so carefully. When people talk about dubstep they aren't talking about a halfstep drumloop and a falling 808, they're talking about Third Base, Plastic People, Big Apple, Music House and Red Stripe. When people talk about berlin techno they're not just talking about 909s on the up and white noise filter bleeps, they're talking about Hardwax, Berghain and D&M.