London’s place as a leading city is due in part to the city’s leading academic and medical institutions. Imperial College, University College London, the Wellcome Trust, to name but a few, are woven into the fabric of the capital.
These institutions are working together to boost the knowledge economy, in which institutions, charities, private funding and academia come together to create innovative solutions. This trend often produces associated organisations that want to locate near these hotbeds of innovation and are generating growing demand for space.
Take the Francis Crick Institute as an example. The Crick is to open a biomedical research institute this year in the capital on a carefully chosen site amid a cluster of leading hospitals, scientific research houses, and one of the world’s leading universities, University College London. Once operational, the Crick will employ 1,500 staff including 1,250 scientists, and will have an initial operating budget of £130m per year.
Med City Partnership
The Crick is a prominent example of the knowledge economy in action, but it is not alone. There is also the MedCity partnership, a collaboration formed in 2014 between UCL, King’s Health Partners, Imperial College, Oxford and Cambridge Universities and the GLA.
The partnership aims to create and build a cluster of life science facilities, focused on care, research and training, in Whitechapel. This is one of London’s most vibrant areas and is set to flourish following infrastructure investment in the area, including Crossrail.
The technological advances fostered by the knowledge economy in turn promote scientific discovery. Rapid developments in robotics, 3D printing and raw research are prompting some academic organisations to transform their discoveries in the laboratory into products for the marketplace.
Imperial Innovations, which has expertise in the therapeutics, medical technology, engineering and materials, ICT and digital sectors, is leading the field in “technology transfer”. It works to commercialise early stage academic research by providing funding support and business set-ups.
So far, Imperial Innovations’ spin-outs have created more than 1,000 jobs, and its work has expanded from Imperial College to other leading UK universities.
The upshot is that the time it takes to bring a laboratory concept to the market is getting shorter. And most of the enterprises involved in this consider a London location a vital part of their success.
The Crick Institute is a good example of increased demand for property associated with the knowledge economy. Some 18 months ago we noted that the pharmaceuticals sector was taking a keen interest in King’s Cross Central.
This interest began to intensify to the point at which pharmaceutical companies were competing for the same office space, partly because of the 45-minute journey time from King’s Cross to Cambridge but also partly because of the Crick.
Demand outstrips supply
Now we are reaching the point at which supply is unable to accommodate the number of companies seeking office space.
The enormous potential of the knowledge economy is likely to be as influential a factor behind space requirements in London as tech sector companies are now. The significant space absorption by the likes of Amazon and Google will be matched by firms associated with the knowledge economy.
We are not alone in this thinking. To quote a recent report by PwC: “Within a decade, the health and wellness business will look and feel like other consumer-oriented, technology-enabled industries – retail, banking, publishing and music. Soon, healthcare will have its own iconic, Amazon.com-style brands.”
Richard Howard is head of emerging London at Cushman & Wakefield
