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Two or three clusters, read side by side across sectors, research, companies, capital, infrastructure, government designations and UKIZ relevance. There is no score and no ranking: British clusters are different from one another, not better or worse than one another.

Choose up to three clusters

Side by side

Dimension	Sheffield & RotherhamYorkshire and the Humber	Teesside & the HumberNorth East / Yorkshire and the Humber	Norwich & the EastEast of England
Sectors	Advanced Manufacturing, Advanced Materials Supporting: Clean Energy, Robotics & Autonomous Systems, Mobility & Transport Technology, Digital Technologies	Clean Energy, Advanced Manufacturing, Advanced Materials Supporting: Digital Technologies, AgriTech & FoodTech	AgriTech & FoodTech, Engineering Biology, Clean Energy Supporting: Life Sciences, Digital Technologies
Research	University of Sheffield	Not recorded on the map.	University of East Anglia John Innes Centre Quadram Institute
Companies	Not recorded on the map.	Not recorded on the map.	Not recorded on the map.
Infrastructure	Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre Nuclear AMRC High Value Manufacturing Catapult centres, nuclear manufacturing facilities and industrial research factories.	Centre for Process Innovation Process innovation and biologics scale-up facilities, port capacity and grid-connected industrial land.	Not recorded on the map. Plant and food research institutes, genomics facilities and offshore energy operations bases.
Capital	Public co-investment, corporate partnership and asset finance rather than venture capital.	Infrastructure capital, corporate investment and public programmes; almost no local venture base.	Research council and charitable funding dominate; venture capital is scarce.
Government programmes	No place-based designation recorded.	Teesside Freeport — Freeports Humber Freeport — Freeports	Freeport East — Freeports
What exists	One of the strongest applied manufacturing research bases in Europe, covering machining, materials, nuclear manufacturing and factory-scale process development, working directly with industrial customers.	The largest concentration of industrial decarbonisation activity in the UK: hydrogen, carbon capture, process manufacturing, biologics scale-up capability and two Freeports with substantial serviced industrial land.	Plant, food and genomics research of international standing, offshore energy operations and maintenance, and a significant agricultural production base on the doorstep.
What's missing · UKIZ interpretation	Domestic demand. World-class process capability is often demonstrated for overseas primes, and local SMEs lack the capital to adopt what is proven a mile away.	Skills pipelines and company formation. The land, power and permits exist; the innovation companies and the technical workforce to fill them do not yet exist at the same scale.	Commercial translation of agri-food science, and connection between offshore energy operations and the research base inland.
What could connect · UKIZ interpretation	Applied manufacturing research connected to domestic customers — energy, defence, mobility and medical technology — with procurement used as the connector rather than grants.	Industrial land and process scale-up capability connected to research clusters elsewhere that have technologies without a place to build them — a national scale-up site rather than a regional one.	Agri-food and genomics research connected to national food manufacturing and to engineering biology capacity, and offshore operations connected to the Humber and North East energy supply chain.
UKIZ relevance	The research is world class; the domestic customer base for what it produces is thinner than it should be. The proposed Midlands and Teesside & Humber missions both depend on this capability.	This is where Britain either builds an energy supply chain or imports one. The proposed Teesside & Humber mission is explicitly about retained industrial capability.	Food security and biotechnology intersect here more clearly than anywhere else in Britain, and connect to the proposed Oxford–Cambridge mission.
Last verified	15 August 2026	15 August 2026	15 August 2026

Proposed by UKIZ · not a government designation

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