It takes a leap of imagination to see it, but on the site of a crumbling 1970s office block a 10-minute walk from Cambridge station, plans are being drawn up for a brand-new campus that could help transform the city.
The project, a purpose-built, 80,000 sq ft “innovation hub”, aims to bring together founders and investors to create companies that can spill out into the city’s many science parks. It is being promoted by Cambridge university and an alliance of developers and Big Tech interests.
Supporters point to similar schemes such as the Station F campus in Paris, the world’s largest start-up incubator, and the Kendall Square innovation cluster in the “other” Cambridge in Massachusetts. Projected to cost £200mn, it is expected to win seed funding from the UK government.
But the ambitions for the project are far bigger. Not only will the hub be part of a massive expansion of Cambridge that aims to double the size of the city within 25 years, it is intended to help turbocharge one of Britain’s most productive regions, and with it the wider UK economy.
It will also be a crucial litmus test for Britain’s ability to revive its stagnant economy — both its ability to attract and retain talented scientists and entrepreneurs and its capacity to build the infrastructure that will facilitate growth.
“You can visit six innovation hubs in one day in Boston, but you couldn’t find three in the UK,” says Diarmuid O’Brien, the university’s pro-vice-chancellor for innovation, who leads the project and is responsible for forging links with industry. “There’s an innovation infrastructure deficiency in the UK and this project is about filling that.”
The expansion plan is a key ingredient in the revived “Arc” growth corridor between Cambridge and Oxford, its historic university rival. According to research by the Oxford-Cambridge Supercluster Board, an advocacy group, this could generate a potential £78bn boost to the economy over the next decade. In the past few months, ministers have thrown their weight enthusiastically behind the scheme, declaring it a “national priority”.
But doubling the size of Cambridge presents enormous challenges — ones that have defeated previous governments with similarly lofty aims. Eastern England not only lacks transport and power infrastructure, it is cripplingly short of water and exposed to drought. Loved by tourists for its historic architecture, which is heavily protected by planning laws, the city itself is a difficult and sensitive location. Attempts to expand it have met extensive delays and intense local opposition. And the project’s sheer scale means that it will require not just hefty government funding, but huge private investment too.
Some 50 years after the university, one of the world’s leading educational institutions, opened one of Europe’s first science parks, the question is whether the UK is still capable of delivering a project of global significance, especially at a time of limited fiscal resources at home and intense competition from abroad.
The Cambridge Growth Company, a government-backed vehicle, has been created to mastermind the scheme. Its chair is the former developer Peter Freeman, who helped transform King’s Cross in London from a disused industrial site to a vibrant new commercial and cultural quarter.
He is well aware of the scale of the challenge, but prefers to emphasise the rewards. “If Cambridge does double in size, and it is done intelligently and sensibly,” he says, “then my message is very clear: it could be an even better place to live.”
The concept of what has become known as the Oxford-Cambridge Arc dates back at least 20 years. Originally launched in 2003, it was energised in 2017 by the UK’s National Infrastructure Commission, which announced a strategy to build 1mn homes along a revived rail line connecting the two university cities. En route is the late-1960s new town of Milton Keynes, which has become a centre for logistics and warehousing.
After the plans were shelved by Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson in 2022 — they did not fit with his “levelling up” agenda, focused on poorer areas of the UK — they were partially resuscitated by Rishi Sunak and his housing secretary, Michael Gove, who promised to build a “new urban quarter” in Cambridge featuring 250,000 new homes. After local leaders protested that this was “absurd”, the figure was cut to 150,000 — still far higher than the city council argued was feasible.
Now the Arc is back. As part of plans to improve the UK’s feeble economic growth rate, in January chancellor Rachel Reeves promised that Labour would fix “supply-side constraints” in an attempt to double the region’s economic output. “It has the potential to be Europe’s Silicon Valley. The home of British innovation,” she said.
For Cambridge university’s vice-chancellor, Deborah Prentice, all this is understandably welcome news. Since Labour was elected last summer, the city has received a steady stream of ministerial visits, including last week from Lord Patrick Vallance, the innovation minister, who has been appointed as the “innovation champion” for the OxCam revival. “It’s now about economic growth for the country. The vision has changed,” Prentice says.
Prentice was speaking to the Financial Times in the university’s £40mn West Hub, a student meeting space in the middle of the university’s West Cambridge Innovation District, which is now home to several science departments. The hope is that the site will undergo a massive expansion in the coming years, with the potential for 4mn sq ft of additional laboratories and commercial space spread across 160 acres.
The innovation hub will sit at its centre, says Prentice. “The hub is about having a central place for talent to interact, to learn how to make a business plan, to find a pathway.”
There is very much a political dimension to the scheme, she acknowledges, given that it could be well under way by the time of the next UK general election. “It’s an early win, for us and for the government, we think,” she says. “And it will catalyse our ability to get attention, get funding, get the energy in.”
Yet the economic picture is complex, says Dan Thorp, the chief executive of Cambridge Ahead, an advocacy group that represents a coalition that includes chipmaker Arm, the Wellcome Sanger Institute and the university.
Politicians love to laud the global successes of Cambridge — which is also home to cyber security group Darktrace — but its growth story has been faltering recently, he warns. Analysis by Cambridge’s Centre for Business Research published on Monday shows that the number of “business births” in Cambridge has more than halved in the six years leading up to 2023-24. “Start-ups and spinouts have fuelled the Cambridge phenomenon since the 1960s, but the latest data suggests that the fuel of homegrown growth has been thinning,” he adds.
One reason is physical capacity. According to recent research by the consultancy Public First for the Oxford-Cambridge Supercluster Board, a shortage of lab space in the city has driven rental costs almost to San Francisco levels.
But doubling the size of Cambridge, let alone in 25 years, will present huge challenges. The city is already wrestling with water shortages and road congestion. And house prices are 12 times average earnings, nearly 50 per cent above the national average in England of 8.2.
Bridget Smith, Liberal Democrat leader of South Cambridgeshire district council, is sceptical that expansion can be achieved in that timescale, particularly if Cambridge is to avoid the pitfalls of Silicon Valley, a place riven by social inequality and homelessness — a comparison that anyway she rejects as “lazy”.
If Cambridge really wants to compete, she argues, it must attract highly mobile international talent while also serving the needs of the local population. “What I hear from big business is that recruitment is more and more challenging because our quality of life offer here isn’t really comparable to Bristol or Reading,” she says. “When you’re trying to attract whizzy 30-year-olds, we need to offer more than a pretty medieval town.”
Smith cites recent warnings by local water companies that sewage treatment works are already at capacity. Then there is Cambridge’s well-documented shortage of water, which two years ago caused the Environment Agency to pause plans for 9,000 houses and some 300,000 sq metres of research space because of lack of evidence that there were sustainable water supplies.
Big infrastructure schemes such as the Fens Reservoir project and the East West Rail project linking Oxford to Cambridge — now costed at £7bn — are at least a decade away.
“The roads are bursting, the sewers are overflowing, we’ve run out of water and we’re about to run out of electricity,” says Smith. “We have to deal with the blockers: infrastructure, social infrastructure, access to healthcare and so on.”
The task of dealing with those “blockers” will probably fall to Freeman, co-founder of property developer Argent and the outgoing chair of Homes England, who was appointed to lead the Cambridge Growth Company last October. Responsible for leading the city’s transformation, the CGC is backed initially by £10mn of government funding. Freeman will set up in Cambridge next month and hopes the venture will become a fully fledged development corporation.
As well as the Cambridge West development, his targets include other science parks to the south and north of the city, including the expansion of the Biomedical Campus and the long-awaited redevelopment of the 450-acre site that houses Cambridge airport — a site slated for up to 12,000 homes and 5mn sq ft of commercial space. There are also schemes to expand the original Cambridge Science Park, founded in 1970 in the north of the city, earmarked for a 5,600-home development (subject, that is, to a twice-delayed decision to relocate a sewage treatment works).
Freeman’s letter of appointment described his task as a “national priority”, and he believes he will get ministerial support at the highest level. In his favour is the fact that the Labour government seems determined to reform the UK’s labyrinthine planning systems. This month, a significant planning and infrastructure bill was introduced in parliament, promising to increase the power of local authorities to buy land for strategic projects and make it easier and faster to build.
Still, Freeman estimates he will need at least £500mn in seed funding from the government in the next four years — not a “grant”, he argues, but an investment that could unlock £100bn in additional GDP by 2050 and “overcome any scepticism” about the project.
“We’re looking at a global industry for life science, and investors can choose where they come — London, Paris, Boston,” he says. “And if the offer from Cambridge is more difficult, the reality is, they don’t have to come.”
Everyone involved in the project is keenly aware that previous iterations of the OxCam Arc foundered on fierce local opposition. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has said repeatedly that his government will back the “builders over the blockers”, but community leaders warn that the government would be wise to try to bring the public with them.
Nicky Shepard, the chief executive of Abbey People, a community hub in one of Cambridge’s poorest wards, near the potential airport development, says that some residents are cynical. “The default response is, ‘It doesn’t matter, no one cares what we say, they have already decided what’s happening,’” she says. “You can either do things from a paternalistic, ‘power-down’ sort of way, or take a collaborative, ‘community-up’ approach. To deliver this level of change, there will have to be a bit of both.”
Mike Davey, the Labour leader of Cambridge city council, also argues for a consensual approach. “As a city we’ve built more council houses than anywhere else other than Birmingham,” he says. “The government is coming to a place that knows how to do it, but don’t come in like a bull in a china shop . . . you’ll alienate the community you’re trying to serve.”
There will certainly be those who object, says Wendy Blythe, chair of the Federation of Cambridge Residents’ Associations. She fears that the cost of developing Cambridge for the national good will fall on local people in the form of higher water bills, increased pollution, traffic disruption and a decade of unsightly construction. In the Office for National Statistics’ annual wellbeing in the UK survey, Cambridge scored 6.5 out of 10 in 2023 — below the national average of 7.45 and a sharp decline from 7.9 in 2021.
Blythe says she resents being cast as a “Nimby” for worrying about the region’s internationally significant ecosystem of chalk streams. “If I care about my river, the River Cam, does that make me a Nimby?” she asks. “Cambridgeshire is not just some blank canvas for the government. These plans amount to just selling off the family silver for the national interest.”
James Littlewood, the chief executive of Cambridge Past, Present and Future, a charity that fights to preserve the landscape around the city, agrees, describing the vision of doubling the size of Cambridge by 2050 as “delusional”.
He also accuses the government of being dishonest about a “water credits” scheme that allows developers to buy credits from entities that have reduced water consumption or implemented water-saving measures, calling them “an absolute farce that I believe will eventually become a scandal”.
Standing on a hill to the south of the city, looking down towards the 17th-century tower of Great St Mary’s Church, Littlewood points out the boxy buildings of the Biomedical Campus, which stand out starkly against the skyline. “These giant ‘techboxes’ are going up everywhere,” he says, gesturing in a grand circle. “The citizens of Cambridge will have to look at this crap for the rest of their lives.”
Freeman is alive to the risks of losing public goodwill, and has already held meetings with Littlewood and Blythe, whose group he is scheduled to address in May. His talk is being advertised as “Making Cambridge a Happy City”.
But whether he can succeed where generations of politicians have failed will depend on attracting billions in private investment and far more governmental support than has yet appeared — not just in this parliament, but far beyond.
Even ardent supporters like Councillor Smith warn that the project must address what she sees as decades of under-investment in her region. “Cambridge is special thanks to its university and science sites, but we’ve got to get even more special to secure our place on the international stage,” she says. “To do that, the government is going to have to put its hand in its pockets. Deep pockets.”
Cartography by Cleve Jones
