There’s a running joke at Film London, the mayor’s film and television screening agency, that Enfield needs a new moniker. At Film London, they refer to the north London borough as EnFlix because of the amount of interest it is attracting, not just from the streaming giant they adapted the new name from but from scores of TV and film businesses.
Like logistics, the TV and film industry went from strength to strength during the pandemic with demand for visual content skyrocketing as the nation binged on boxset after boxset.
Over the course of just two years, Enfield has gone from being home to one film studio to becoming the largest collection of studio space in London. And the borough isn’t planning to call “cut” on the sector any time soon.
Last year, it gave the go-ahead for Location Collective to open its first studio in the borough, the 3.2-acre OMA in Enfield Lock, while in February this year, it struck a deal with Troubadour Theatres to open a major studio at its £6bn Meridian Water development. This summer, Location Collective opened a second major studio, OMA:X, on a 10-acre industrial site owned by Goodman, just 750m from its first studio.
Rumours abound, too, that Netflix has agreed to lease the whole of SEGRO’s 230,000 sq ft SEGRO Park Enfield for studio space.
A leading role
Mark Bradbury, director of property and economy at Enfield Council, puts the borough’s box-office style success down to its rich industrial and logistics heritage and open and engaged council.
“We’ve moved from having one studio to very shortly having five, with a combined floor space of getting on for a quarter of a million square feet, and I think part of the reason has been that we have the space,” says Bradbury. “These are large facilities, a combination of sound and film stages that need a large, high building. And we have that.”
He adds: “We’ve also been very proactive with the organisations that want to set up studios, and the developers that they’re working with, to make it as straightforward as you can through the planning process… Having a dedicated planning officer that understands [the needs of the sector] has been really important in enabling people to take advantage of that space quickly.”
Becky Butler, head of operations at Location Collective, says it’s not just the space that Enfield can provide that makes it an attractive place for the film industry, nor its location and access to Heathrow and the M25, it’s the vision the council has for the role of the sector in the regeneration and success of the borough.
“I remember going to a dinner that Enfield Council had organised, and there was a very clear vision for bringing the creative industries to Enfield,” says Butler. “It felt serendipitous that we’d found this building and been lucky enough to land in a borough where there was huge support around bringing the film industry to the area.”
Having a highly engaged leader in Nesil Caliskan and an Oscar-nominated TV and film director in Ian Barnes as your deputy leader helps a little bit too.
Showcasing local talent
“The kudos of having a globally recognised industry with brands that everybody has heard of is important to us. That helps other industries to understand where Enfield is,” says Bradbury. “But now that we’ve got this industry based here and now that we’ve got the major players producing here, what we need to work on is developing locally based talent. Yes, perhaps in front of the camera, but certainly behind it, the set building, the lights, and some of that is connecting and repurposing our existing industries.
“One of the key reasons we decided that we were going to take advantage of what appeared to be happening already and make it really go with a zing wasn’t just about these large organisations filling large boxes because, frankly, we can get logistics companies to fill those, it was because the diversity of jobs in this particular sector was really important to us,” he adds.
For Dan Holford, a director in the development team at SEGRO, the extensive reach of the creative industries and their pull on attracting other related businesses is just one of several reasons the industrial REIT is increasingly engaging with the film and TV industry. Not that he could mention any names.
“What we build is quite appealing to the creative industries because we build in the right sort of locations, we build buildings that have got huge, clear spans with decent floor loadings and the ability to park vehicles,” he says. “It means we can capitalise on opportunities within the creative sector.”
But therein lies the potential challenge for Enfield and its ambition to become the heart of a new film and TV cluster in London. Demand. The space that film studios want is very often the space that logistics companies want. And logistics companies may be more willing to sign the longer leases more traditional landlords want.
“In Enfield one of the advantages we’ve had over the last couple of years is that there has been enough new space coming to market to meet demand from both,” says Bradbury. “Our challenge going forward is keeping that up… We’ve been lucky for the last couple of years that developers such as SEGRO and others happen to have had a pipeline of space coming through. But where’s the next tranche coming from? It’s going to be an interesting conversation with the mayor and others over the next year or two about how we balance these demands.”
Pain relief
For now the borough is providing solutions not headaches, says Film London’s head of inward investment and business development, Helena Mckenzie.
“Enfield is for us at Film London one great big paracetamol tablet because it relieved me of the huge headache we had of finding space,” she says, adding that the borough is fast becoming a go-to place for the sector, complementing the established film heartland in West London.
For Bradbury, complementing and collaborating will be vital to the success of the sector, not just for Enfield but for London as a whole.
“Our key opportunity now is to cement that by focusing on the ecosystem and making sure that we’re on the map,” he says. “The major streamers are producing here, and we want to keep them coming back. It will be the ecosystem and the continuing support of the local authority that will do that. If London is responding to that international demand with capacity that happens to be focused around two key clusters, that really does benefit London as a whole.”
And, with more than 10,000 new jobs needing to be filled in a sector that over the past five years has generated some £10bn of investment for the UK economy, it is clear to see why this particular creative industry could be the blockbuster UK PLC needs.
Want to know more about how Enfield is establishing itself as the home of UK streaming? Listen to Reel Estate: A Spotlight on Enfield as a film and TV production hub. The 50-minute discussion is free to download from the EG Property Podcast, available on all good podcast players.
To send feedback, e-mail samantha.mcclary@eg.co.uk or tweet @samanthamcclary or @EGPropertyNews
