British Land has established an advisory council as it turbocharges plans to develop 1.9 million square feet of life sciences and innovation sciences space over the next seven years.
The Innovation Advisory Council will be chaired by non-executive board member and advanced technology expert Lynn Gladden, with other members announced in the coming weeks.
Gladden is Shell Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Cambridge and the executive chair of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. The Board will include experts in life and data science and sustainability industries and will advise BL on its stated plans to be the UK's leading life sciences REIT. It will advise on growth, customer requirements, provide insight on future trends, help the business build connections and underwrite new acquisitions.
The REIT says the massive investment drive will focus on developing for high-growth life sciences and innovation sectors in London and across the Golden Triangle of London, Oxford and Cambridge where supply is constrained. But there are also other areas where it is in the early stages of working up plans, including a major reworking of the former Debenhams at Southgate in Bath.
It says its Euston campus at Regent's Place, in the centre of London's Knowledge Quarter, is uniquely positioned to unlock growth opportunities given its proximity to research and education organisations. At the Canada Water campus in Southwark it has the potential to create another significant innovation cluster, according to the REIT, while its recent acquisition of Peterhouse Technology Park, and land adjacent to it, will be its first campus in Cambridge.
BL says by the end of the year it will have delivered 190,000 square feet of lab-enabled buildings across the portfolio and its total pipeline will deliver 1.9 million square feet over the next seven years. To put that into context, its London office portfolio comprises 7 million square feet.
Speaking to CoStar News, Darren Richards, the head of real estate who is overseeing the investment programme, said it is a natural way to "pivot" its campuses.
"Life sciences is actually one of the verticals we are looking at under innovations businesses as a whole. Life sciences are rightly getting a lot of focus but that leaves out data sciences, physical sciences, sustainability, all huge areas of growth. We want to create space for companies that want to work in ecosystems together. They want flexibility and compatible science companies near them and our campuses are perfect for this."
Richards says the 1.5 million square foot Regent's Place estate by Warren Street station is the poster child for its plans. Wholly owned by BL, it is within walking distance of institutions such as the biomedical Francis Crick Institute and Wellcome Trust, which funds research. "Hubs are emerging in London around the institutions and there is real momentum here."
At Regent's Place, BL is working up plans to develop 700,000 square feet of lab and innovation space, including around 570,000 square feet in the Euston Tower, which was built in 1970 and has been vacant since 2021. It has begun a public consultation on creating a "world-leading science, technology and innovation building".
There is another 120,000 square feet of such development planned in existing buildings on the estate, of which half is completed or on site already.
"Labs is a big component of what we are doing with 200,000 square feet that could be wet labs or CL2 (containment level) enabled and fitted labs in the Euston Tower plans," Richards says. "The rest of the space, or 120,000 square feet, is going into existing buildings now and is nearly all fitted labs. The first is at 338 Euston Road and there is already lab-enabled space there being used."
The 17-storey 338 Euston Road is principally occupied by Storey, BL's flexible offices business, but now has 14,000 square feet of lab-enabled space with a first letting completed to Relation Therapeutics, a business pioneering machine learning for drug development.
"A great by-product is these occupiers don't work from home," Richards says. "We are already talking to a lot of people about the options and there is a huge scarcity of space. People want to come in immediately and that makes us confident to develop on a spec basis for the time being."
There are other major chunks available now in Cambridge and at the Priestley Centre on Surrey Research Park in Guildford, a town Richards points out is a hotbed for telecommunications, 5G and gaming.
Richards says BL is in advanced discussions to lease half of the refurbished 83,000-square-foot Priestley Centre to a "life science-type" occupier.
Near semiconductor manufacturer ARM's headquarters at Peterhouse Technology Park, Cambridge, which it bought in 2021, British Land is assembling more sites, in particular the Western Expansion site which it then bought for £25 million with consent for a 96,000 square foot building. It is also working up designs for a 170,000-square-foot development at its Botley Road Retail Park site in Oxford.
BL is also reviewing options for a 103,000-square-foot redevelopment of the former Debenhams unit at Southgate in Bath as a lab-enabled building.
And the other big slice – up to 700,000 square feet – of the seven-year plans is set aside for the group's giant Canada Water regeneration in Southwark.
"Here we can work with someone who wants to start with more of a blank campus," Richards explains. "We can create an ecosystem from scratch. There is great connectivity into key places in London and we are looking at up to 700,000 square feet of development."
Construction of the Paper Yard, 30,000 square feet of modular lab space designed by Hawkins Brown, is completing this May.
Strong occupier interest means British Land and partner AustralianSuper have appointed Stanton Williams to draw up plans for another 300,000-square-foot building with potential to support innovation and life sciences businesses, as part of the second phase of the masterplan. The Paper Yard's is next to TEDI-London, a new engineering higher education enterprise co-founded by three global universities: King’s College London, Arizona State University and University of New South Wales Sydney.
BL's senior team has been on fact-finding missions to Boston in the US to explore a market that is massively ahead of the UK for life sciences development.
"If you look at the States and in turn Oxford and Cambridge here, the residential angle is very important – the fact that workers can live in a community nearby and help build the place. Boston has really gone for it and gone the extra mile and the UK is 10 years behind really," says Richards.
For British Land's investors the message is clear too. "This is a long-term investment but the yield advantage is obvious," Richards says, pointing to the rental premium for lab-enabled and lab-fitted space. "The impact on yields of delivering true life sciences with lab-enabled space is huge, and this is just in the existing portfolio."
British Land will also be looking to grow the platform substantially via acquisitions.
"We will continue to be disciplined around the balance sheet," Richards says. "But we have got inbuilt campus skills and embedded capability and an incredible development team and we will find places to start creating these buildings outside of London. Developing networks in the Golden Triangle is right in the middle of BL's talent zone. There is a high bar to access the market and the plan is to keep expanding the footprint."