WORDS: DAVID LILLYWHITE | PHOTOGRAPHY: BICESTER MOTION
Most UK enthusiasts know of Bicester Heritage, the former RAF base in Oxfordshire that now acts as a hub for historic motoring activities and specialists – but few realise the full extent of the site on which it sits. In fact, Heritage occupies about 20 acres of a 444-acre total. Some of this is the active airfield, but around that are other, currently unused areas, all under the banner of Bicester Motion.
“We now have consents for an extra million square feet around the site,” CEO Dan Geoghegan told us during the summer of 2023. “We have the [existing] Heritage Quarter, plus the Innovation Quarter, Experience Quarter, Wilderness Quarter and airfield – five quarters, as we like to say. We can create a leading location for anything that moves.”
Now, the first of these plans, for seven new, prestigious HQ buildings which total 19,698sq m in the Innovation Quarter, have been given the green light by Cherwell District Council. Bicester Motion submitted the detailed designs for its Innovation Quarter, which will see a £50 million investment to deliver the buildings suitable for R&D technology, light assembly and product showcase, and will range from 697 sq m to 5574sq m.
Construction of the first phase is due to start in spring 2024, and target practice completion is in the first quarter of 2025. The carbon-efficient buildings will be prepared for solar PV technology creation, and include dedicated ecology and biodiversity areas, green-space amenities for staff health and wellbeing, and more than 100 bicycle-parking spaces. On top of this, Bicester Motion has also committed to significant infrastructure improvements including cycle and connectivity to Bicester North station and the surrounding area.
“Here, we’re in close proximity to the Oxford-Cambridge corridor, to Oxford itself and to Motorsport Valley components,” explains Dan. “There are a lot of innovative, exciting, well funded businesses in the area that need a home to crack this problem – the problem of the environment. If we’d started 20 years ago with a plot of land in the middle of Oxfordshire, we’d be saying ‘let’s kill cancer and do life sciences’, and that’s still happening – but the window that we are in at the moment, the focus, quite rightly is about the environment. It’s about saving the planet.
“Saving the planet is all about CO2… CO2 solutions are all about technology and innovation. Clearly, a central focus of that issue is around mobility, whether that’s flight, whether it’s motoring, and we find ourselves with a blank-canvas opportunity to create a home for all those exciting things. Let’s try to solve a problem, where we can still travel safely, quietly, environmentally friendly, user friendly but responsibly. That’s what we can do here.”
In addition, there will be the Wilderness Quarter (below, top), which will have an off-roading area but will be mostly about walking, cycling and nature – it already has three lakes. This area was part of the original RAF Bicester, but when the M40 was being built the site was dug for gravel, hence the formation of the lakes.
And then there’s the Experience Quarter, which Dan likens to a first visit to an Apple Store, but for car sales: “Apple really stood out on the high street – intriguing without being overly pushy. And you’d go to hang out and look at what it had to offer, try a few things, meet your friends there and become absorbed in a demonstration – an opportunity to touch and feel what was happening. That’s how we envisage the Experience Quarter working.
“With cars, there is a lack of interest by the customer to go to a showroom. At the same time, the makers are faced with having a load of new products – electric cars. And if you’re trying to launch something new, at a time when customers aren’t going to your distribution channels, how do you talk to them directly? Where would the manufacturers go to talk to their customers?”
He goes on: “That’s the Experience Quarter (above), sat in 40 acres where you could go for a walk and look at the 4x4s through the Wilderness Quarter. But it might be anything from whatever the next hoverboard is, or electric Harleys or hydrogen garden machinery… We are very interested in it being a showcase where people come and hang out for fun – but it sows the seed, as with Apple.”
There have also been plans for a hotel (below) for several years, but these are now on hold, as Dan explains: “We realised as we saw these other opportunities in innovation and experience that the hotel we would have built in, say, 2018 would have been very different from the hotel we’d build today. So we have said, let’s see how the rest of the site is going to look, and then we’ll know how the hotel should function.
“We’re very much looking forward to doing it, but it’ll be on the basis of a much more informed usage pattern – business and commercial and consumer. Because if the Experience Quarter is, say, half a million people a year, and it goes in that direction, then that’s a different hotel, too, and a site that is perhaps leading in a different direction.”
With all this going on, it’s now time for a second round of equity raising. The Innovation Quarter will cost £50m and the hotel £30m-40m. The Experience Quarter will be £50m; including the Wilderness Quarter, Dan currently estimates investment of £200m. Is that do-able? He is confident it is.
“We’ve always been systematic and methodical. We might enthuse about all the businesses here and really enjoy it, but at the end of the day it’s got to be professionally run. The numbers have to add up, because that is how you make something survive and be sustainable.
“It’s something we’re very focused on, but with regards to the future development, they’re bigger buildings, there are economies of scale building, we own the land. Our model is slightly different to that of a normal developer, who’d buy the land and then layer on building costs and staff and consultants. At Bicester Motion we have a lot of that in-house anyway.
“There are plenty of exciting things happening here – and the potential for a lot more.”
