West Midlands · England
Birmingham & the West Midlands
Design the vehicle, find someone within an hour who can actually make the part.
Proposed by UKIZ · independent · not a government designation
Can you get in?
Capability access in Birmingham & the West Midlands
Facilities, entry routes and the conditions attached to them. Where Birmingham & the West Midlands does not hold a capability, the national route is named instead.
Available here
Capability the evidence places among organisations and facilities in this field.
Energy R&D and systems modelling
Applied research and whole-system energy analysis
Energy Systems Catapult, Birmingham
How you get in: Programme participation or contracted work
Source: Energy Systems Catapult · verified 2026-08-19
Access evidence last verified 2026-08-19.
The place
The West Midlands is where Britain still makes vehicles and the thousands of components that go into them. Electrification has changed the content of that work rather than ending it: battery research, power electronics and quantum sensing now sit inside the same supply chain culture that has been machining, pressing and casting here for a century.
Birmingham is young, large and genuinely multicultural, with more canal than Venice and the Cotswolds, Shropshire hills and the Peak District all within an easy drive.
- A manufacturing supply chain with unusual depth
- One of the youngest big-city populations in Europe
- Canals, Victorian industry and post-war rebuilding side by side
- Central to the country: everywhere else is reachable
- A food scene shaped by generations of migration
Why Birmingham & the West Midlands?
Design the vehicle, find someone within an hour who can actually make the part.
- Automotive engineering and electrification programmes with global manufacturers in the region.
- Battery and power electronics research linked directly to industrial users.
- Quantum sensing research with practical gravity and navigation applications.
- A tier-two and tier-three supplier base that can prototype and produce.
- The most central location in Britain for rail and road logistics.
The region's venture capital base is modest relative to its industrial weight, and the city's post-war road planning still shapes how it feels to move around.
What's happening here
Britain is building, and a lot of it is here.
Each item below is a real programme, institution or development with a named source. UKIZ does not publish claims it cannot point at.
The West Midlands holds one of the deepest automotive supply chains in Europe
Vehicle manufacture and component supply remain concentrated in the region through electrification.
DSIT: UK innovation clusters map ↗
What this place is good at
Strengths, from the canonical record.
- Automotive engineering and electrification
- Battery and power electronics research
- Quantum sensing and gravity sensing
- Manufacturing supply chain depth
- Mobility & Transport Technology
- Advanced Manufacturing
- Quantum Technologies
- Advanced Materials
- Clean Energy
- Digital Technologies
- Defence & Security
DSIT cluster data records the West Midlands among the largest manufacturing R&D concentrations in the UK.