Canary Wharf announces £500 million project to build Europe’s biggest commercial lab

Canary Wharf today announced plans to build the biggest private lab in Europe as the area continues to diversify beyond finance.

Dutch company Kadans Science Partner, which specialises in building lab-ready properties, has set-up a joint venture with the Canary Wharf Group to develop a new 22-storey building that will have 750,000 square feet of space devoted to labs.

Once complete, the building - thought to cost around £500 million - will be home to thousands of workers and house up to a hundred businesses. Its owners want to fill it with a mixture of biotech startups, academics, clinicians and more established pharmaceutical companies.

James Sheppard, Kadans’ UK chief, said: “We’re effectively going to be building a campus under one roof.

“A lot of clinicians now are also entrepreneurs, they want to build a business.”

The block, set for completion in 2026, will be the largest commercial lab space in Europe and form the cornerstone of a new 3.3 hectare development on the Wharf’s North Quay meant to attract life sciences businesses spanning biotech to healthcare.

The new development will be on a similar scale to the Crick Institute, the biomedical research facility established by London universities in 2016. However, the Canary Wharf development will focus on commercial applications of science.

Canary Wharf is hoping to take advantage of rapid growth in the sector and the UK’s traditional strength in sciences, centered around the so-called “golden triangle” of London, Oxford and Cambridge.

Last summer the government set out a 10-year strategy for making the UK a “science superpower” in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng announced plans to “build a pro-enterprise environment” where life sciences startups “can commercialise breakthrough products right here in the UK,” though funding was subsequently delayed.

Howard Dawber, head of strategy at Canary Wharf, said: “There is huge demand for this.”

He said labs in London were already at capacity with a vacancy rate of just 4% in Oxford and 1% in Cambridge.

Dawber said: “We’re offering exactly what’s required by these fast growing businesses.”

Canary Wharf’s ambition to get into the life sciences sector has been under consideration since 2019 and comes as the Canary Wharf Group looks to diversify beyond its traditional core market of finance. Thousands of flats are being built in the area as it seeks to attract residents as well as businesses.

Dawber said life sciences businesses based at the Wharf would benefit from close proximity to banks that could finance or advise on commercialization.