Interface Polymers, a Warwick University spinout, needed somewhere to make its materials at pilot scale. It tried at Teesside, where the technology fit was wrong, it also tried a former Dow Chemical site in Charleston, where at one point it was funding eight engineers at $200 to $300 an hour.
Finally, it ended up building a plant in India and finished in six months.
“…not very well set up for this stuff today.”— Chris Kay, co-founder, Interface Polymers, on the UK
We think that is the UK lab space shortage in one company's invoice.
Yet the property data points the other way.
How does a country with record empty laboratories lose a pilot plant to India?
Record Empty Labs, Nowhere to Scale
UK lab vacancies reached a record 14.3% in the second quarter of 2026, more than doubling in two years.
Across the Golden Triangle of Oxford, Cambridge and London, they passed 25%. Developers, delivered 1.8 million sq ft of new lab space there in that time, and less than 130,000 sq ft started on site in the first seven months of 2026.
So why does the UK lab space shortage still come up in every founder conversation?
We believe the empty buildings and the missing ones are different buildings.
The empties look like standard life sciences lab space UK investors were comfortable funding. The deep tech lab space UK founders want is smaller, fitted, flexible, or built to manufacture rather than discover.
That is our reading and not a settled finding.
A lab space London shortage, in the plain sense of too few labs, is hard to find in the figures now, but what remains is narrower.
“…it lacks the space to support deep tech innovation as it scales.” — Alice Sewell, Investment Director, Imperial College London, on London
The Founder Who Built What He Could Not Rent
Harry Destecroix could not find lab space in Bristol for Ziylo, the diabetes-technology startup he co-founded, so he built an incubator, and it grew into Science Creates, and Ziylo was later sold to Novo Nordisk in a deal reportedly worth up to $800m.
Companies kept outgrowing those first labs and leaving the city.
OMX is the answer: a retrofitted industrial unit near Bristol Temple Meads, scheduled to open in March 2026, with units from 1,000 to 5,000 sq ft and £8.5m of funding behind it.
It offers wet lab space that UK scale-ups can lease on flexible terms, some of it is CL2 lab space UK teams doing containment level 2 work can use without leaving the city.
Together, the three Science Creates sites total more than 75,000 sq ft.
Bristol has raised $761m in deep tech venture funding since 2020, the most of any city outside the Golden Triangle.
We think a Bristol deep tech cluster only holds together when its companies have somewhere to go next, and it shows what a founder-led answer to the UK lab space shortage can look like.
“That shouldn't happen.”— Dr Harry Destecroix MBE, founder, Science Creates, on companies outgrowing their labs and leaving Bristol
Why was it a founder, rather than a developer, who built this?
The Missing Rung Between Lab and Factory
We believe the hardest rung sits just after the lab.
Startups make up 77% of a UK deep tech sector valued at £260bn in 2025, and many need industrial units to prove they can manufacture before serious investment follows. That proof happened in the pilot and demo manufacturing space, and London's first facility dedicated to it opened in March.
Imperial College London built it.
Grapht Works in North Acton has 28 units from 100 to 1,700 sq m, its tenants include Solena Materials, Epoch Biodesign, Aed Energy and 2D Nano.
On 2 November, the cultivated pet food company Meatly moved in ahead of first production runs in 2027, backed by a £10.4m Series A.
We should be plain that Imperial is the landlord and the numbers are its own.
Even so, a startup choosing pilot and demo manufacturing space in London over Charleston or India is the reverse of the Interface Polymers story.
Deep tech scale-up space like this is the piece we think Kay was missing.
Grapht Works does not end the UK lab space shortage, though, so are 28 units a solution, or a pilot of its own?
Some Founders Simply Left
Deep Blue Biotech grows marine cyanobacteria for sustainable health and beauty ingredients, it left the South East of England for a shared lab in Sheffield, all team rarely works in the building all at once, so it does not need a huge space.
“…a far more economical way of doing things.”— Tim Corcoran, co-founder and COO, Deep Blue Biotech, on communal labs
Scotland shows the pattern at scale.
Over two years, 140 enquiries for lab, office and manufacturing space came in, covering more than 1.2 million sq ft.
Laboratories made up 84% of them, nearly half came from startups and SMEs, and the gap sits in mid-sized grow-on labs and GMP facilities.
Glasgow has responded with a £20m fund aimed at developers.
We think Sheffield and Glasgow are betting that affordable deep tech lab space and UK founders can reach outside the South will pull them north. The UK lab space shortage looks different in each place, and deep tech lab space UK-wide is not one market.
Four Answers, One Open Question
In October, Imperial and Warwick launched a scale-up called Pathway, linking London deep tech with West Midlands manufacturing, with the Greater London Authority and West Midlands, and combined Authority behind it.
Each answer so far adds deep tech scale-up space in one place for one kind of company.
If UK deep tech investment 2026 keeps outrunning the buildings founders need, who decides which of these answers gets copied nationwide, and who ends the UK lab space shortage for the founders still waiting?
Read Next: Inside the UK Semiconductor Industry in 2026
Sources: CoStar Group release via Business Wire, 6 August 2026; Imperial College London news, 5 March and 2 November 2026; Chemistry World on Interface Polymers; University of Bristol press release, 26 January 2026; Science Creates; Royal Academy of Engineering State of UK Deep Tech 2025, as cited by the University of Bristol; Dealroom State of UK Deep Tech 2025, as cited by Imperial; The Star on Sheffield Technology Parks; Daily Business on CBRE's Scottish Enterprise report, 6 May 2026; The Business (Scotland) on Glasgow's £20m fund, 30 January 2026; Global Venturing on Ziylo; Tech.eu, 7 October 2026.
