Relocation special: Stuck in the middle

Race for space
Motorsport Valley is an area of motorsport and high-tech engineering excellence, centred on Silverstone racetrack in Northamptonshire. The majority of the UK’s specialist motorsport firms have their research, design and engineering facilities here, including most Formula 1 racing teams. The UK is a world leader in motorsport, with 80 per cent of the world market, involving some 4,000 companies, a considerable number of which have a presence in Motorsport Valley. And in addition to fast cars, Fairline Boats, a manufacturer of motor yachts, recently opened a new 10,000 sq ft project development centre in Oundle in Northamptonshire.
‘There are other companies in Northamptonshire in our supply chain,’ says Fairline chief executive Derek Carter. ‘We’ve doubled the company’s size in the past ten years, but not our facilities. Quite simply, we had run out of space and needed somewhere we could develop new products.’

According to Clark, Leicester is one of the new ‘boom towns’ of the Midlands, along with Nottingham, and is a national centre of excellence for space research. It’s developing a space science park, with the National Space Centre at the hub, while the Space Research Centre at Leicester University is at the forefront of the UK’s space research programme.

Nottingham, meanwhile, is one of six Government-designated ‘science cities’ and has one of the country’s fastest-growing bioscience clusters, centred around the BioCity development and the city’s two universities. BioCity, which opened in 2003, is the largest specifically biomedical science park and incubation centre in the UK, currently housing 37 companies.

More than money matters
If you do relocate to the Midlands, don’t expect too much in the way of financial support. The region’s relative prosperity means that the major Objective One EU funding programme that has helped regenerate vast swathes of South Yorkshire and Merseyside is not available. However, there is some funding assistance in the shape of Selective Finance for Investment (SFI) in certain parts of the region, mainly in the north and rural Lincolnshire, but also parts of Leicester and Nottingham.

Of course, not every business location decision is dictated by financial or commercial considerations. For training company the Effective Performance Group, it was the lifestyle that tempted it to relocate from Manchester to Lincoln.

Some say Lincoln offers more tranquility than other Midlands cities

‘Most of our work is done online or via digital media, so we aren’t tied to being in a busy city centre environment. When I was thinking about relocating the business for personal reasons, it was the quality of life which led us to choose Lincoln over Manchester,’ says Phil Crowshaw, sales and marketing director of the Effective Performance Group.

And if even the tranquil pace of Lincoln gets too much, you haven’t got to travel too far to find respite: Lincolnshire supposedly had more lunatic asylums than any other English county. Most are now closed, but one or two have been turned into luxury hotels, so finding a bed shouldn’t be a problem.

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