Everyone Wants a Silicon Valley Wealth Machine
But the UK will struggle to identify and develop successful industrial clusters.
Jaguar is one of the automakers hosted at Mira Technology Park, a hub that the Labour government hopes to emulate in its manufacturing cluster plans.
Photographer: Betty Laura Zapata/BloombergTake a trip round the Mira Technology Park and you may find reports of the British car industry’s impending doom exaggerated. The zone in the English midlands hosts Europe’s largest concentration of automotive research and development operations, featuring household brands from Jaguar and Toyota to James Bond’s storied Aston Martin (albeit none of these is UK-owned). Occupying a site that’s currently the size of 45 football fields, the park has planning permission for extensions that will enlarge its built area by about sevenfold.
The park, owned by Japan’s Horiba Ltd., is testament to the power of industrial clusters. It groups a collection of testing facilities such as a driver simulation center, crash laboratories and wind tunnels that would be difficult and expensive to replicate elsewhere, making the site an obvious location for auto companies engaged in developing next-generation vehicles. The park’s operator is benefiting from a renewed spurt of investment in the UK car industry, as angst recedes over the adequacy of future battery-manufacturing capacity. But clusters can also feed on their own momentum, with companies keen to be close to competitors at a time of accelerating change.