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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.

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Side by side

Dimension	Teesside & the HumberNorth East / Yorkshire and the Humber	Nottingham & DerbyEast Midlands	OxfordSouth East
Sectors	Clean Energy, Advanced Manufacturing, Advanced Materials Supporting: Digital Technologies, AgriTech & FoodTech	Advanced Manufacturing, Clean Energy, Mobility & Transport Technology Supporting: Advanced Materials, Digital Technologies, AgriTech & FoodTech	Quantum Technologies, Life Sciences, Space, Artificial Intelligence Supporting: Clean Energy, Advanced Materials, Engineering Biology
Research	Not recorded on the map.	University of Nottingham	University of Oxford Rutherford Appleton Laboratory
Companies	Not recorded on the map.	Not recorded on the map.	Not recorded on the map.
Infrastructure	Centre for Process Innovation Process innovation and biologics scale-up facilities, port capacity and grid-connected industrial land.	Not recorded on the map. Propulsion and nuclear engineering facilities, rail test capability and chemistry research centres.	Harwell Science and Innovation Campus Diamond Light Source Satellite Applications Catapult National laboratory campus facilities, quantum fabrication and metrology capability, and clinical research infrastructure.
Capital	Infrastructure capital, corporate investment and public programmes; almost no local venture base.	Corporate and supply chain finance; limited venture activity.	University-linked funds and specialist deep tech investors, with London capital an hour away.
Government programmes	Teesside Freeport — Freeports Humber Freeport — Freeports	East Midlands Investment Zone — Investment Zones East Midlands Freeport — Freeports	No place-based designation recorded.
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.	Aerospace propulsion and small modular reactor engineering, rail technology, sustainable chemistry research and one of Europe's busiest air freight hubs.	A research-intensive university alongside the Harwell campus, one of the largest concentrations of national scientific infrastructure in Britain, spanning space, energy, health and physical sciences, with distinctive quantum, vaccine and space applications strength.
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.	Diversification of the supply chain beyond a small number of large primes, and company formation from a strong engineering research base.	Access. National facilities are heavily used by their own communities; companies without an existing university relationship find the route in unclear. Scale-up space and later-stage capital are also constrained.
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.	Propulsion and nuclear engineering connected to Sheffield manufacturing research and Midlands electrification — one Midlands industrial mission rather than three sectors.	Opening national facility access to companies across Britain as shared ecosystem infrastructure, and pairing Oxford quantum and space capability with manufacturing clusters that could produce at volume.
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.	Propulsion and nuclear capability sit alongside the Midlands mobility mission. The proposed Midlands zone connects them.	Oxford has infrastructure most countries cannot build. The proposed zone focuses on making that infrastructure accessible to companies that are not spin-outs of the university.
Last verified	15 August 2026	15 August 2026	15 August 2026

Proposed by UKIZ · not a government designation

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