West is best: Why West London is primed for growth

cityam
06 Mar
Students from Ealing School of Art beside Richmond Bridge, sketching from the path on the Surrey embankment of the River Thames in Richmond, southwest London, England 5th November 1957. (Photo by Harry Todd/Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

West London has high-growth businesses, great transport links and brownfield sites ripe for development. No wonder it’s top of the Mayor’s list for investment, says Peter Mason

We are at a tipping point for London’s economy. We need more homes, but equally, we also need the jobs and economic growth that will allow people to afford those homes and thrive, rather than simply surviving. To achieve this, we must move the needle on London’s established pattern of economic growth, and encourage development and investment outside of zone 1 and in areas that have the most growth potential. And instead of further pooling economic growth into a limited number of markets in limited places in our city, London must play its part in service to the rest of the nation.

West London works

It was therefore pleasing, but not surprising, to see West London near the top of the Mayor’s ‘London Growth Plan’ agenda, published on Thursday, which identified it as an area primed for major growth and investment through areas like Old Oak and Park Royal Development Corporation (OPDC) and the Westtech Corridor that will attract investment of global significance.

Research recently completed by independent think tank Centre for London also backs this up, finding that West London already has a significantly strong economy that is capable of supporting major further growth – with a gross value added (GVA) of £70bn, which is larger than Leeds and Manchester combined. It also found that business growth in West London is outstripping that within Central London by more than 3:1, helped by many transport links including the Elizabeth line, the diversity of complementary and growing industries working in close proximity to one another, and Heathrow Airport.

West London is also home to high-growth sectors, including science, innovation and green industry, manufacturing, transport and logistics, supporting a balanced, diverse workforce. The emergence of the WestTech Corridor, a vibrant new innovation system, has created a new cluster of investment and growth alongside the already existing creative industry cluster at Old Oak, and the aviation tech cluster around Heathrow. This along with OPDC, the largest regeneration project in the UK since the 2012 London Olympics, will support the delivery of 3.5m sqm of new employment space, prioritising growth in industrial and frontier innovation.

The Corridor specifically will support the UK in becoming globally competitive in innovation, with the White City Innovation District campus already experiencing an increase of deep tech businesses by 79 per cent between 2019 and 2023, with a rise in employees by 219 per cent.

Leveraging our growth potential

When it comes to the government’s ambitions and their key focus areas for growth and investment – brownfield land, investment in science and innovation, in geographic areas of economic strength, and enabling better use of industrial spaces – they might as well be describing West London. We have all of those, including 38.5 per cent of London’s brownfield sites and over eight times the amount of industrial space compared with Central London. For brownfield sites, this presents an opportunity to align with the government’s newly updated NPPF and their focus on developing on brownfield land first.

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