Nottingham has always been a city of scientific and medical discovery – Boots, ibuprofen and the MRI were all created in Nottingham. Now, the city is creating an environment that will inspire the next generation of scientific discovery.
Nottingham is one of six science cities in the UK, alongside Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester, Newcastle and York, charged with creating economic growth by creating better and deeper links between business, science, technology and innovation sectors.
By highlighting Nottingham as a city where research and development is encouraged and can take place in ample space across the city, Nottingham is once again a manufacturing city, boosting both the local and national economy and creating more jobs as businesses expand.
And Nottingham City Council is supporting the work to bring the right elements together to make Nottingham a great place to research, develop or even start up new ideas.
Nottingham Science Park, situated between the University of Nottingham and the new Boots Enterprise Zone, offers a range of office, laboratory and workshop space for current and prospective tenants. Hosting companies working on life sciences, medicines, 3D printing, software development and more, the park provides space for small start-up companies, small companies looking to expand or bigger companies looking for top quality office space.
Later this year, construction starts on a new building for Nottingham Science Park on a patch of land next to the existing No. 1 building. The new space will include meeting and conferencing facilities, as well as Grade A office space and incubator space, supporting companies looking to expand their life science, virtual and augmented reality businesses especially, and will open in Summer 2019.
One of the most recent tenants attracted to the Nottingham Science Park is Upperton Pharma Solutions which moved to the park in February 2018. Upperton offers specialist spray drying and formulation services for pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies around the world.
Dr Richard Johnson explained some of the reasons why his company chose to relocate there, commenting: “Upperton is a fast growing, high technology company that needs increasing amounts of high quality laboratory and office space. Our customers expect us to be in a building that is fit for their products and the Science Park meets these requirements in terms of the size and quality of building that is available to companies such as ours.
“Being adjacent to the University allows us to retain close working links with the many departments that we work with as well as enabling us to recruit high calibre science graduates we need to support our continued growth.”
Councillor Sam Webster, Portfolio Holder for Business, Education and Skills at Nottingham City Council, said: “I’m proud that we’re creating an environment for science start-ups to thrive and grow here in Nottingham. Our ambitious plans to drive the science and creative industries will boost our local economy, creating jobs for local people.”
In the city centre, the recently expanded BioCity site continues to support the scientific community in Nottingham. The expansion of the site, including the new Discovery building, ensured the rapid expansion of Sygnature Discovery, a FTSE 1000 top growing firms, could be kept in the city rather than outgrow its old space in the existing campus.
As a result, Sygnature Discovery was able to stay in Nottingham, and the construction of the Discovery building ensured over 300 jobs were not only retained in the city, but created through the building’s development and construction and Sygnature’s expansion. For Nottingham, a brownfield site was transformed into a state of the art, landmark building providing office and laboratory space for new and existing companies, and the space vacated by Sygnature is available for the next tranche of entrepreneurs and graduates.