Compare places

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	Teesside & the HumberNorth East / Yorkshire and the Humber	EdinburghScotland	Liverpool City RegionNorth West
Sectors	Clean Energy, Advanced Manufacturing, Advanced Materials Supporting: Digital Technologies, AgriTech & FoodTech	Artificial Intelligence, Financial Technology, Robotics & Autonomous Systems, Digital Technologies Supporting: Engineering Biology, Life Sciences, Quantum Technologies, Creative Industries	Life Sciences, Engineering Biology, Advanced Materials Supporting: Digital Technologies, Clean Energy, Creative Industries
Research	Not recorded on the map.	University of Edinburgh Heriot-Watt University	University of Liverpool Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine
Companies	Not recorded on the map.	Edinburgh financial services and fintech cluster	Not recorded on the map.
Infrastructure	Centre for Process Innovation Process innovation and biologics scale-up facilities, port capacity and grid-connected industrial land.	National Robotarium Informatics research facilities, robotics commercialisation facilities and supercomputing capability.	Not recorded on the map. University research institutes, automated chemistry facilities and port and logistics assets.
Capital	Infrastructure capital, corporate investment and public programmes; almost no local venture base.	Large institutional asset management presence; venture activity is smaller than the capital base implies.	A modest local investor base; public and charitable research funding dominate.
Government programmes	Teesside Freeport — Freeports Humber Freeport — Freeports	No place-based designation recorded.	Liverpool City Region Freeport — Freeports
What exists	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.	One of Europe's largest informatics research bases, robotics and autonomous systems commercialisation capability, and a substantial asset management, banking and financial technology sector.	Infection and tropical medicine research of international standing, materials chemistry and automated discovery, a large port and a Freeport designation.
What's missing · UKIZ interpretation	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.	A connection between the capital sitting in Edinburgh's financial institutions and the technology being created a mile away; and later-stage funding to stop companies relocating south.	Translation capacity: strong discovery science with limited local scale-up manufacturing and limited early-stage capital to hold companies in the city region.
What could connect · UKIZ interpretation	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.	Scottish institutional capital connected to Scottish deep tech, and Edinburgh AI and robotics capability connected to Glasgow manufacturing and satellite production.	Infection and biologics research connected to North West and Teesside biomanufacturing capacity, with the port used for export rather than only import.
UKIZ relevance	This is where Britain either builds an energy supply chain or imports one. The proposed Teesside & Humber mission is explicitly about retained industrial capability.	Scotland's research strength is not in question; its scale-up retention is. The proposed Scotland mission focuses on the capital and customer layer.	Discovery and manufacture sit unusually close together here. The proposed Manchester mission treats the North West as one health and biomanufacturing geography.
Last verified	15 August 2026	15 August 2026	15 August 2026

Proposed by UKIZ · independent · not a government designation

Back to the map →Methodology →