leeds city region collaborative spaces · the television sector is going to grow in leeds over the...

Collaborative Spaces

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COLLABORATIVE COLLABORATIVE

SPACESSPACESLeeds City Region

Leeds City Region

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As the growth of our digital and creative sector accelerates, we speak to diverse, thriving businesses across the Leeds City Region for their perspectives on why it is the place to start up, scale-up collaborate and grow.



Over the last 10 years, the Leeds City Region has come into its own.

Already a financial and legal centre, it’s evolved into a thriving creative and tech hub, attracting some of the biggest names in the industry. In fact, 19 of the fastest growing tech busi-nesses in the North are based here.

Why? It’s the people, it’s the welcome, it’s the hospitality. It’s how easy it is to network and how willing people are to get behind you. In essence, it’s the community – and ours is incredibly diverse.

There’s a real appetite to make things happen here, so if you show commit-ment, if you put the work in, anything’s possible. You need only look at our two homegrown tech unicorns* to

see it’s true. They came from nothing and now they’re worth more than £1 billion.

And it’s not just tech. The creative and cultural industries are just as impor-tant. It’s one of the fastest growing sectors in the UK and it has a massive impact on our economy, but it also defines what the region feels like and makes it a better place to work and live.

Of course, the two industries aren’t mutually exclusive. Technology is part of the very fabric of our culture and creativity is at the heart of every new tech innovation.

With that in mind, it’ll come as no surprise that the needs of business-es are changing, especially when it

The rise of collaborative spaces

“Channel 4’s new National HQ in Leeds is a massive vote of confidence in the region. It’s a ground-breaking institution that has already started to stimulate growth”

comes to their workspaces. They want more flexibility, which is why we’ve seen a sudden influx of co-working spaces. In an unpredictable world, they allow businesses to grow and shrink on demand. But it’s more than that. They bring people together, they feed collaboration and explore the possi-bilities that technology presents, in business, in art and in life.

Nicola Greenan, Director of East Street

Arts and member of the LeedsCity Region Enterprise Partnership (LEP).

*SkyBet , TransUnion (formerly Callcredit)

Leeds City Region


A thriving ecosystemWhy do business in Leeds City Region?

Digital Infrastructure• Home to five Gigabit

Cities – Bradford, Leeds, Huddersfield, Wakefield and York benefiting from CityFibre’s ultra-fast full fibre infrastructure.

• 99% broadband coverage by 2021

• The UK’s first London independent internet exchange within the heart of Leeds

Growth • Our creative and digital

sector employs 102,000 people across 12,300 businesses - it has seen a 31 per cent growth over the last 6 years

• Leeds has the highest amount of scale-up digital companies outside the South East.It also boasts the highest number of telecoms, media and technology sector jobs outside the capital with over 25,000 employees

• Bradford is the UK’s best city to start a business according to Barclays

• Leeds has seen over 26,000 new business start-ups 2012-2018 placing it #3 in the UK (Barclays SME Growth Factor Index)

• Leeds voted as the best English city to set up a business in a co-working space (Rightmove)

• Leeds has the highest number or Scale up businesses outside of London (Scaleup index 2018)

• Leeds City Region has several exciting opportunities to locate creative and digital technology business in transformative city centre developments including Leeds South Bank and York Central enabling a great business environment and fast rail connectivity to the capital

A digital and creative hub• Leeds City Region is

the new home of UK broadcaster Channel 4’s national headquarters. They join a thriving creative ecosystem of film makers, games designers and digital agencies

Leeds City Region


“Leeds is distinctively ambitious, powered by innovators, entrepreneurs and social pioneers. There is real momentum across the city with the arrival this year of a Barclays Eagle Lab in the AvenueHQ coworking space, NEXUS (the University of Leeds Innovation Centre) and Co>Space North, a space for people passionate about digitally enabled health and care to connect, collaborate and co-create.”Eve Roodhouse, Chief Officer Economic Development, Leeds City Council (Tech Nation 2019)

Leeds is home to the UK’s tallest piece of street art – the iconic mural Athena Rising mural reaches more than 150ft (46m) from the ground on the revamped Platform building redeveloped by Bruntwood to create a vibrant tech hub next to Leeds Train station.

Leeds City Region


There’s an attitude outside London that’s different, the world is viewed differently and I think it’s been really helpful. Television can be quite mo-nocular in the way it presents a coun-try and I think coming from Leeds and the North of England has given us our own world view that’s not necessarily going to be the same as they have in London.

Holbeck is really fit for purpose in the 21st century, you’ve got lots of really interesting, really creative young busi-nesses and that’s given the area a real buzz. You can feel already that they’re going to transform the South Bank - this is going to be a real hotspot for digital.

“It’s a world class metropolis with the Yorkshire Dales on its doorstep”

It’s really nice for us as a 21st century business to be in a building that is a key part of Leeds’ industrial heritage. It’s got that lovely Northern brick feel about it. As a company, we’re called True North because we make Northern programmes in the North of England, so being in a building that’s rooted in that idea is really nice.

Channel 4’s decision to open their Na-tional HQ in Leeds is a clear indicator

that the city is on the up and we’ve got this fantastic digital industry now with companies like Sky and DAZN, it feels like a city that is succeeding.

I would absolutely recommend it to anyone thinking of setting up a business or indeed moving an existing business here. It’s a fantastic place to grow a business.

“Retaining talent is a really key thing for us”

The television sector is going to grow in Leeds over the next few years, with-out a doubt, so it’s really important to offer people a really nice work space.

We try to make sure people have a good environment to work in and the mill is very much part of that. It’s nice, it’s light, the office space is good, and even though it’s a piece of industrial heritage, it has a modern feel about it. We’re only 5 minutes from the south entrance of the station, we can walk into town in about 10 minutes and that’s really helpful.

Creativity is about conversations

Marshall’s Mill, Leeds.

True North

“Andrew Sheldon, Creative Director


Investleedscityregion.com/#WELCOME 9“ “Huddersfield was an obvious choice”

see traces of the industry that once thrived in these rooms. Everything here is somewhat industrial, but it’s also modern and that’s exactly the kind of vibe we wanted to be working in. It gives you the right mind-set for a day’s work coding.

And the prices are good. Working slightly outside of Leeds, somewhere like Huddersfield or Wakefield, gives you the benefit of being near a big active hub, but with lower overheads. Ultimately in a business you’re trying to make money, so keeping costs down is a pretty big seller for starting up round these parts.

“We wanted to create a unique digital company”

Running in the Halls is an interactive design agency, with a focus on web-sites, apps and games, though we also do one-off digital installations and experiences. We’ve delivered a lot of exciting projects from here, including making a world record-breaking rep-lica of Pac-Man and a dart-throwing robot controlled by eye movement for Channel 5’s The Gadget Show.

The office space is modern and industrial, it’s exactly the kind of space you’d associate with a young, online company, so it gives the right impression and puts clients at ease. This works just as well for talent too, modern, young, exciting and edgy, our freelancers feel like their careers are moving forward with the right sort of company

We’re all from different parts of the country, but we were excited by the culture around digital and media art in Huddersfield. Being close to that has influenced us greatly and helped us think about our projects in a more imaginative, unusual way from the start. The university keeps new blood flowing through the town, and although the vibe here is very relaxed and laid back, you still feel very much at the forefront of digital develop-ment.

Working in Bates Mill is amazing as there are loads of tech companiesin a small location. You get to know the faces, and who they are, and who they work for, so it’s a great way to form working partnerships with people.

“Everyone is feeling a bit of buzz since Channel 4 decided to movehere”

The space itself is amazing, we have a fairly typical office, but it’s full of history and character. You can still

Running in the Halls

Alison Cox, Partner and Senior Coder

Bates Mill, Huddersfield

Leeds City Region


“We get to live somewhere beautiful and work somewhere convenient”“

I started the business in 2007, based out of an incubator in Leeds. We were predominantly creating TV commercials, but the market changed quite quickly, with web taking the place of traditional TV, so we found we were doing less content for television and more for digital channels. That evolved into how we now use video as a channel for businesses to communicate with their employees.

We moved to Halifax from Leeds in 2008. At that point we were growing, I was trying to establish the company, so I wanted to attract talent to a new fledgling business – Halifax was ideal because we were slap bang in the middle of two big media centres, in Manchester and Leeds.

“It’s a beautiful old mill that’s been nicely restored”

We’ve been in The Elsie Whiteley Innovation Centre for 11 years. Two mills were being renovated to create a really cool place to work, which was quite inspiring, and I wanted to be part of that. It’s now run by a charity called The Halifax Opportunities Trust, so while it’s a commercial enterprise, the profits go back into supporting the most disadvantaged areas in Calderdale, which is important to us.

I started on the first floor of the building and I’ve worked up to the 6th floor. We now have about 3,000 square foot on the top floor of the mill, in comparison to 100 square foot in year one, and the building has supported our growth at each critical point.

“There’s an entrepreneurial spirit in the Leeds City Region”

There was such a positive movement behind lobbying for Channel 4 to move to Leeds, and quite a few of our agencies outside of Leeds recognised the value of them coming. The Leeds City Region is a really strong region, and while we’re a small town, we are part of that family.

Leeds as a city has been punching above its weight for a long time and that’s great, it kind of comes from having that Yorkshire grit, a lot of people want to do better, to raise the profile of the North, so it’s interesting and it’s exciting.

Limehouse TV

Nick Howard, Managing Director of Limehouse TV

The Elsie Whiteley Innovation Centre, Halifax



Assembly BradfordAssembly Bradford is a serviced office, co-working space and event space on North Parade. We’re located a stone’s throw away from Forster Square Sta-tion and we’re in an Edwardian listed commercial chamber. Our space is really stunning, we’ve got a beautiful vaulted ceiling, dual aspect windows and beautifully designed, bespoke ply desks.

As a freelancer, lone working can be very isolating. It’s really difficult to actually reach out and meet anybody else, so having a space that you can go to regularly helps combat that isolation, it helps build a network of like-minded individuals. The beauty of sharing a space like ours is you can share tips and ideas, you can collab-orate.

“We shout about all the exciting things happening in Bradford”

There are a lot of exciting and inno-vative things happening in Leeds, but we wanted to create something in our own city, to show that Bradford has bags of potential. It’s architecturally stunning, it’s also super affordable, not just to work here, but also to live here.

You can have a better quality of life and lower overheads, which means you can take more risks, and that’s useful for growing small businesses. Doing something interesting in a city that’s emerging gets us a seat at the table, something you might not get in a larger city.

Bradford has a well-established, but under the radar, creative scene. It’s a little more punk and DIY . Here at Assembly Bradford, we host GLUG Bradford, we engage with the com-munity by trying to create things they want to come along to. We’re hosting a whisky tasting, just to get people into the space to see what we do, and we’re planning a young professionals networking event later this year too.

“It’s jammed full of exciting people doing innovative things”

The Leeds City Region has a wealth of talent when it comes to tech and creativity.

Channel 4 investing in Leeds is a clear vote of confidence in the area and the creativity that it offers. We’re hoping that Bradford can get a bigger slice of the pie moving forward.

It’s a land of opportunity. There’s so much potential just waiting to be tapped. There’s a 4,000 capacity live entertainment venue coming to the city soon, there’s a new food market coming to Darley Street and they’re planning on opening an urban village within sight of our co-working space, so there are loads of exciting opportu-nities in Bradford.

““Shared experiences in a space that’s more productive than working from home”

David Craig, Co-director

Bradford

Leeds City Region


Leeds City Region


ACOLLECTIVE, York

York is beautiful, it’s an old historic city. Our office overlooks theShambles, which people come from all over the world to visit, and we just stare at it out of our office window. It’s also smaller, so it’s easier to network and get to know other businesses.

In our industry, Leeds is known as a serious hotbed for large search companies, it’s got really big agencies to rival the likes of London – you don’t have those kind of mega agencies in York, so we’re able to put our stamp on this town, which we wouldn’t be able to do elsewhere.

“It’s really good for supporting small businesses”

I started at The Hiscox Building, in the Business Club, which is great for freelancers working with a laptop and a mobile phone, but when you need to employ people, you need fixed desks with fixed computers, phone lines, things like that.

“The lockable studios at ACOLLECTIVE have allowed us to move into what feels like our own office, even though it’s still a co-working space, and be able to afford it. We don’t pay rates, we don’t pay electric, we don’t pay for cleaning, it’s all taken care of.

There’s a real mix of businesses with different skills, that we otherwise wouldn’t know about or meet. It’s really good for supporting other businesses and I think we’re all learning more than we would do otherwise. Because we’ve got other people in really close proximity to us that have different knowledge and skill sets, we’re able to pick up and absorb some of that.

“It’s a different pace of life”Everything is walkable, we’re not in this massive sprawling city. It’s got all these fascinating little eateries, pubs, microbreweries and restaurants, it’s almost like being in London, and it never used to be like that. I think that has a subconscious effect on people’s wellbeing, it takes a bit of an edge off the stress levels.

“If you value your work-life balance, York is always going to be better”

Remaining in the city centre is very important, it’s a draw when we’re trying to hire, and therein lies the beauty of somewhere like ACOLLECTIVE because you don’t get these kinds of spaces outside of town, but perhaps if they didn’t exist, we wouldn’t be able to remain in the centre of town.

Edge45

Colin Docherty, Founder and Owner of Edge45



Rabbit Hole was your classic starter company in your bedroom. Tim and I worked together at University – we really liked living in Leeds and we really loved our student experience, so it never even crossed our minds to go somewhere else.

There’s a lot of innovation and culture in Leeds and I think the people that are driving that forward want to work with local companies like us rather than London agencies. It’s exciting to see how the independent food and drink sector has sprung up over the last 10 years too. We’re now starting to see the same thing with the tech sector. We feel like Leeds has grown and we’ve grown with it.

“Our business rocketed after we moved into Duke Studios”

We came to Duke right at the begin-ning, and what appealed about the vi-sion for it, was the idea of being a part of a community with similar start-ups and agencies, like-minded people, that would just make our jobs feel a little bit nicer. We met people in the first few months of moving into Duke Stu-dios that we still work and collaborate with today, so it was a genuine game changer for us.

I wouldn’t work anywhere else in Leeds because there’s just a vibe and a feel-ing here, everyone’s really nice and I’m really happy to be working here. I feel like everything I want is here in Leeds. It’s big enough that there’s commerce, innovation and culture, but at the same time, it’s not so big that it’s overwhelm-ing, so we feel connected.

“Leeds is a really nice place to work”

The city is full of vibrant communities, there’s a tech community, an arts com-munity, a music scene, and I’ve found those communities very welcoming, I’ve been able to get involved and get some work out of them. It’s a super welcoming city and there’s a real DIY, independent spirit in Leeds, which has benefited our work as a lot of these starters need companies like ours to define their brand, help with the ini-tial marketing or create a website.

The city is welcoming, it’s collab-orative, I think there is a spirit of entrepreneurship and collaboration, because it’s still growing, you can start something really great and make a difference.

““Leeds is really getting into its stride in tech”

Rabbit Hole Duke Studios, Leeds

Mark Martin, Co-founder and Managing Director of Rabbit Hole

Leeds City Region


Leeds City Region


“

Production Park is a unique environment for the development of live events. It’s a place that unites technology, manufacturing, design, creative spaces and education. It came about by focusing on the needs of the world’s biggest touring artists, to provide a dedicated support environment for those guys.

We now have over 15 businesses operating on the park and a dynamic and creative cohort of over 200 students. Five years ago, it was clear to see what was happening in the economy and the insatiable rise of live events. We came up with a plan, and started with an old distribution warehouse, creatively converted to house five companies working in entertainment technology and live events. Over that period we’ve grown from around 35 people to over 300 and we’re now moving onto new ‘designed for purpose’ projects, which is really exciting.

“There’s a sense of community and a real can-do attitude”

Co-working spaces allow for rapid ‘live’ communication, which is the best way to share ideas. In our case, this facilitates unique collaborations of creativity and expertise, which drives things forward. It also allows companies to be in a safe and private environment, so confidential commercial projects can be developed easily and with reduced risk.Being in Wakefield, great connectivity,

a supportive local community and the trademark Yorkshire friendliness have all become assets that our clients appreciate.

We’re also passionate about creating a University for Wakefield, and we’re starting work now on building an innovation centre, a new incubator, co-working spaces and an events hub, which we see as being the foundations for a wider creative industries-focused university.

“It’s a creative community that people want to be part of”

We’re fundamentally ‘grassroots’ and have a number of freelancers or sole trading creatives working at any one time on challenging commissions from across the world.

However, we recognise the value of the local creative communities, and more recently, we’ve had support for projects through the Leeds LEP team and met with organisations like the University of York and University of Leeds on potential R&D projects. We’re also partnering with Wakefield Council on a three year project to expand incubator space on the park where smaller companies and freelancers can be based.

“It’s a unique mix of manufacturing, design and creativity, all focussed on creating live experiences”Lee Brooks, Co-founder and CEO

Production Park Wakefield



We offer hardware and services to support productions within digital media departments. It all started because I was, and still am, a student at Backstage Academy, which is the university based here at Production Park.

We were already familiar with the workings of Production Park, the clientele it brings and the amazing opportunities that it presents. The biggest artists and productions come through here – it’s Yorkshire’s best kept secret. Honestly, hand on heart, there’s nothing like it in the world. It’s the MediaCity of live events – the entire ethos of the campus is networking, connectivity and collaborative working. There are so many companies, designers and entrepreneurs coming through the site every day, we couldn’t have put ourselves in a better place to grow.

“It’s a really close community, especially the live events industry”

Everyone knows everyone and they help each other out – that intimacy is really important. And Yorkshire is absolutely heaving with people who want to get involved in tech, people who want to produce really cool stuff – and that’s aided by the work that’s happening at the University of Leeds, here at Production Park and across the region in general.

The fact that we can get anywhere in the country in three hours is ideal – and that plays a big part in our work, because we’re the call out people when things go wrong. We do a lot of work in the e-sports industry in Lon-don, we do a lot of work in the Middle East – we work all over, so it’s really

“If you’re working in live event technology, this is absolutely the place to be”

important to have this really strong hub to call home.

“The collaborative environment is the most important thing”

The talent coming through the area, both from the university and the freelancers here at Production Park, is really important. It keeps us on our toes and it drives us to be better.As a company that only launched 18 months ago, it was really important for us to have a strong network of people around us, so when we have big projects coming in, we feel like we can handle it. There are 150 people on site every day that we can call at a moment’s notice. The fact that you can have a small team, but feel like you’re 100-strong, that’s the benefit of Production Park.

Klean Dalton, Lucid Technologies

“Lucid TechnologiesProduction Park, Wakefield

Leeds City Region


30 Chapel StreetBradford

The rise of co-working spaces continues apace, fuelled by the power of collaboration, community and cost-effectiveness, the number of co-working spaces in the Leeds City Region continues to grow – and the latest to join their ranks is 30 Chapel Street. It’s a social enterprise in a Grade II-listed building in Little Germany and they’ve applied to join Impact Hub, a global network of co-working spaces that drives social innovation.

“Unlike most cities, we aren’t pursuing a narrative of being the next ‘Silicon Valley’, we’re looking for the technology intersections between communities in Bradford,” Imran Ali, Co-founder of 30 Chapel Street, explained.

“The city has a burgeoning social enterprise scene and a growing grassroots arts and culture community, so we’re developing events and programmes to help find humane technology and digital arts intersections, creating a platform for people, projects and places in those areas. Putting the social back into social enterprise”The millennial generation are digital nomads. They have a laptop, they have a mobile, they can work anywhere. But research suggests that what they

lack is human interaction. It can be a quite isolating experience and feeling like you’re part of the community is important, so they wanted to create a tribal community around social entrepreneurship, using the co-working model to bring people together and encourage collaboration.

Although it’s yet to officially open, 30 Chapel Street has already created a sense of community in Bradford with a packed calendar of events, including a place-making workshop to co-design and co-create their new space. But their most successful event to date was TEDxBradford – 300 flooded into the The National Science and Media Museum to see 17 world-class speakers, and soon, the event was trending on Twitter in the UK.

Kamran Rashid, Social entrepreneur

Leeds City Region


The Media Centre

Huddersfield

The Media Centre was formed in 1995. Originally, it was a project of the local authority, they were very forward thinking, so they saw that we needed to create a hub to bring businesses together to get those clustering benefits you get when you have like-minded people working in close proximity. But it grew so fast that within 5 years of opening, it became independent of the council.

In 2007, in collaboration with the local authority, we built a new environmentally-friendly, great green credentials, modern glass building that looks fan-tastic. Now, in our 24th year, it’s a complex of four buildings in the centre of Huddersfield – we have 120 businesses and 530 people working here. We also host a number of meet-ups that are either run by ourselves or by other people in the community to get people together.

“It’s going to be on a totally different level in a few years”

The creativity comes from the residents – when you put those 120 businesses together, you feel it and you see it. Co-working is all about creating a space where diverse groups of people, who may not have anything in com-mon, build up trust and forge friendships, that’s when they realise they can learn from each other. I think that is the power of co-working.

The Leeds City Region has a long legacy, over 100 years of

entrepreneurial spirit, and I think that still exists. The digital infrastructure in Leeds and the confidence in the digital space is starting to really bear fruit now and it’s be-coming really exciting, people will want to be near that. I think Channel 4 and what it brings to Leeds is going to accelerate that even more so now.

Huddersfield is an extraordinary town.

A lot of people can’t really point to Huddersfield on a map, but it’s full of the most extraordinary people and talent. It’s got a real entrepreneurial spirit and I think that comes from our long legacy of textile mills,

manufacturing firms and engineering companies, there’s a real culture of entrepreneurship in Huddersfield.

The location is absolutely fantastic. We’re almost equal distance between Manchester and Leeds. We’ve got a train line, The Media Centre is less than a two-minute walk to the train station, and there’s a train every twenty minutes to Manchester or to Leeds.

““We’re here to help you move forward”Brent Woods, Chief Executive

Leeds City Region


Oportunity, lifestyle and community

Quality of life • National Geographic

Traveller names West Yorkshire on cool list 2019

• Sunday Times Best Places to Live 2019 “head to the lively heart of Leeds for stylish shopping, culture and food”

• A vibrant craft ale scene including Magic Rock, Northern Monk, Northern Brewing Co

• Channel 4’s HQ will based at Majestic Leeds a landmark building which was formerly used as a cinema and nightclub

• Man Behind the Curtain, Leeds is one of five Michelin starred Yorkshire restaurants whilst Bradford’s Prashad has a Bib Gourmand accolade for its Indian cuisine

• The Climate Innovation District, a pioneering, sustainable community on Leeds South Bank bringing together energy-efficient technology and Scandinavian design



Oportunity, lifestyle and community

If you’re a digital or creative business looking to set up a new operation in Leeds City Region, then grant funding may be available.

WELCOME

IT consultancy costs for the layout of system

and cabling

Office fit out Equipment Alterations to premises

Architects / design consultancy fees

The funding can contribute towards the costs related to the investment including:

Your business could be eligible for a grant contribution of between £10,000 - £50,000 if you meet the following criteria:

• intends to establish new operations in Leeds City Region

• is a creative, digital or technology business

• has eligible capital costs associated with this investment

• is creating five or more full time, permanent jobs in the City Region

• has a trading history of a minimum of 12 months

• has an eligible capital project with a value over £10,000

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Leeds City Region


Get in touchCall : + 44 (0) 113 348 1850Email : [email protected]

Leeds City Region Enterprise Partnershipinvestleedscityregion.com/#welcome

@investlcr

leeds city region collaborative spaces · the television sector is going to grow in leeds over the...

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