South East · England
Oxford
Use national scientific infrastructure most countries cannot afford, then walk home through a meadow.
Proposed by UKIZ · independent · not a government designation
The place
Oxford's distinctive asset is not only the university. It is Harwell, a campus south of the city holding national facilities for space, energy, health and physical sciences, including instruments no single company could ever justify building.
The city itself is small, walkable and unreasonably beautiful, with rivers, meadows and the Cotswolds beginning almost immediately outside it. It is also expensive, and knows it.
- A compact stone city you can cross on foot
- Rivers, meadows and colleges interleaved with laboratories
- National-scale scientific facilities twenty minutes south
- A transient, international academic population
- Cotswolds countryside straight out of the ring road
Why Oxford?
Use national scientific infrastructure most countries cannot afford, then walk home through a meadow.
- Quantum computing and sensing research with a growing commercial base around it.
- Vaccines and therapeutics research with proven translation into deployed products.
- Space and satellite applications clustered around the Harwell campus.
- National facilities: light source, laser, computing and materials instruments, accessible to companies as well as academics.
- London reachable in about an hour, Heathrow closer than that by coach.
Housing is among the least affordable in the UK relative to earnings. Laboratory supply is no longer the binding constraint, a large development pipeline has delivered, so the live constraints are housing, water resource and grid connection capacity.
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.
Harwell hosts national scientific facilities covering space, energy, health and physical sciences
The campus concentrates national-scale research infrastructure available to academic and industrial users.
UK Research and Innovation ↗
What this place is good at
Strengths, from the canonical record.
- Quantum computing and sensing
- Vaccines and therapeutics
- Space and satellite applications
- Access to national-scale scientific facilities
- Quantum Technologies
- Life Sciences
- Space
- Artificial Intelligence
- Clean Energy
- Advanced Materials
- Engineering Biology
UKRI publishes location data for the national facilities hosted on the Harwell campus.