UK FILM STUDIOS
PRODUCTION
production offices and workshop units and virtual production stage opened in early 2021. February ‘21 New £18m Creative Content Hub for Birmingham ‘in the works’ with plans for a 50,000sqft. campus facility for independent TV production and creative content developers. Based at The Bond in the city’s historic Creative Quarter. The site is being developed by Oval Real Estate and Oval Developments. January ‘21 The Bottle Yard Studios in Bristol is to expand following confirmation of an investment by the West of England Combined Authority. The expansion plan includes the conversion of an industrial property located at South Bristol’s Hawkfield Business Park into three new sound stages measuring 20,000 sq. ft, 15,000 sq. ft and 6,800 sq. ft, complete with ancillary spaces including production offices, prop stores, costume/ makeup areas and break out spaces, totalling approximately 82,000 sq. ft of converted floor space. January ‘21 Troubadour, operator of Wembley Park Theatre based at the old Fountain Studios site, announces it is to open a purpose-built TV and film studio complex on a 155,073 sq. ft plot in Enfield, North London. The complex will be built in two phases. In phase one three sound stages will be constructed: Stage 1 at 20,921 Sq. Ft.; Stage 2 at 11,216 Sq. Ft. and Stage 3 at 8,213 Sq. Ft. along with
no time to die
productions. “Film was a bit boom and bust in the sense that it came in and then it left,” says Wootton. But now with the nature of high-end episodic TV “it just rolls and rolls. That is because of the rise not only of the platforms themselves, but the rise of those platforms’ preferred content, and that preferred content is multi episodic content, which is made potentially for multiple years, and that brings stability into knowing that work will feed all of this infrastructure.”
NEW MONEY And it’s that, as much as anything, that has led to the influx of investors into the studios space. “Private investment in the stage space sector is really still
studios used to be seen as a poor investment bt traditional investors
in a fairly embryonic stage,” says Space Studios Page. “If you look at the two major pieces of private investment, they’ve really only happened in the last year or two - L&G with Sky and Hackman Capital with Dagenham. But if you actually rewind prior to that, there hasn’t been a huge amount of private investment.” But the interest of investors takes time to come.
“Building, designing, planning and constructing stage space is a fairly complex business,” says Page. “It’s not the same as residential or other more standardised forms of commercial real estate. It’s got a lot of nuances. But there’s probably more understanding of it now because I think it’s piqued people’s interest given the growth that everybody understands is happening in the screen sector.” Says Wootton: “Studios used to be seen as
a poor investment by traditional investors. But now the studios and streamers themselves have said this content production is here to stay. That’s given confidence to landowners and developers to think ‘there is a real business here, there’s some certainty, there’s some stability, it’s worth going for that planning permission, it’s worth converting that space.” And certainly, in the short term, a growing studio
sector becomes a much more attractive proposition for landlords and property investors when compared
Summer 2021
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