Secret phone booths, Lego walls and meeting rooms named after Game of Thrones locations probably aren’t design features that immediately spring to mind when you imagine a life sciences building. Yet each one of them has been masterfully woven in and around state-of-the-art lab spaces at British biotech company Bicycle Therapeutics’ HQ. Here, in the middle of a science park on the outskirts of Cambridge, the worlds of design and scientific discovery have seamlessly collided. And it’s not just about the aesthetic.

‘We always knew we wanted this building to be different to what you might expect from a life sciences facility,’ says Rich Hughes, the company’s head of computational and structural sciences. ‘We wanted a space that was going to be attractive enough to bring people into work.’

The UK life sciences sector contributed £43.3bn to the economy in 2024, according to PwC. It employs around 300,000 people and will need to recruit a further 145,000 over the next decade if the UK is to maintain its position as a global world leader in the sector, says Dr Kate Barclay MBE, skills strategy consultant at the UK Bioindustry Association. And those 145,000 people will all need somewhere to work.

But gone are the days of soulless, cookie-cutter lab spaces. As companies compete for top talent and critical investment, the buildings and facilities that support this multi-billion-pound industry have an increasingly vital role to play.

“Scientists are humans, too”

Bicycle Therapeutics takes that role very seriously. When the company, which is developing a new class of medicines to treat cancer and other diseases with offices in the UK and Boston, opened its refurbished and remodelled 45,000 sq ft UK HQ in May 2022, it set a new standard for facilities in the ‘Golden Triangle’ — the name given to the area between London, Oxford and Cambridge widely considered the centre of the UK’s life sciences sector.

From the collegiate-style breakout spaces to the dedicated games room and the statement timber-clad reception area complete with a double-height Green Wall, the building is, for the most part, more convivial than clinical.

Even the labs themselves, necessarily high-tech by nature, are softened thanks to their proximity to the more traditional, mainstream desk and breakout spaces from which they are visible through huge windows. ‘They are pretty accessible,’ says director of laboratories and facilities Chris Lelliott. ‘Anyone can come and see what’s going on in the labs and how their piece of the puzzle actually drives the innovation here.’

‘That results in a greater cross-pollination of ideas,’ adds Alistair Milnes, Bicycle Therapeutics’ chief operating officer. ‘This new HQ serves its purpose both as a laboratory space but also somewhere that brings the business and science sides of the company together. That has been a real tipping point for us.’

Indeed, the space acts as a showcase for the company’s wider work and research, says Adrian Caddy, founder and chief executive of Greenspace, the design consultancy behind Bicycle Therapeutic’s brand, which includes its workplace interiors. It is no accident, he says, that the building, and the reception area in particular, looks and feels like a visitor centre.

“I want these workplaces to be sensual and stimulating, not soulless” — Fred Pilbrow, architect

‘This facility is used to bring in investors and government officials to showcase the science, the team and the operations so we wanted the space to really draw people in,’ he says. ‘The aesthetic has been softened using wood which creates a really successful marriage between the scientific backdrop with an organic, human design style.’

And why wouldn’t you design spaces like this for human beings? It is one of the greatest misconceptions within the built world that life sciences buildings need to be cold, clinical fortresses, says Fred Pilbrow, senior founding partner at architectural practice Pilbrow & Partners and the designer behind Bicycle’s new HQ and the world-famous Francis Crick Institute in London. It is arguably an even greater misconception that the people working within those buildings don’t want, or indeed don’t need, to work in places and spaces that have been designed with human beings in mind. ‘Scientists are humans, too,’ he says. ‘While the lab environments have obviously got to be quite clinical and generic, collaboration spaces in life sciences buildings can, in contrast, be much richer and more materially diverse. I want these workplaces to be sensual and stimulating, not soulless.’

‘It was all about bringing warmth,’ adds Pilbrow & Partner’s founding partner, Tal Ben-Amar, one of the architects behind the scheme. ‘We did that with materials but also by using very soft lighting and bringing in elements of nature.’

Learning from The Crick

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The Crick Institute. Credits: Peter Cook Photography courtesy Pilbrow & Partners.

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Bicycle Therapeutics’ facility was based on what was done at The Francis Crick Institute in London’s King’s Cross back in 2016. Perhaps the best-known example of a life sciences building that embraces a modern design, Pilbrow & Partner’s Pilbrow worked on it not once, but twice. The first time was as design partner when HOK and PLP did the original design and then again in 2021 alongside Ben-Amar when Pilbrow & Partners took on the redesign of the interior spaces.

‘The Crick was pivotal in the transformation and quality of life science working environments,’ says Pilbrow. ‘There was an acknowledgement that what was going on inside a building like this was really important for the UK economy, science and clinical outcomes and therefore we wanted it to be more public. We brought the atria more towards the exterior of the building to create a window to the world of the work that was going on inside. Because we made that building more open, let more daylight in and allowed for lots of visual permeability, it made for a better working environment internally as well.’

If anything, workspaces in the life sciences and biotech sectors need to deliver more than traditional office buildings when it comes to end-user satisfaction. With very particular skill-set requirements, attracting and retaining the best talent and the brightest minds is everything. Human-centred spaces that promote well-being, collaboration and the sharing of ideas and information are not just a nice-to-have. They are of paramount importance to globally significant scientific discoveries and breakthroughs.

Then there is the very simple fact that people who work in this sector don’t tend to do so from home, given their unique requirement for access to equipment and specialised space – lab or otherwise. Take the occupancy rates at Bicycle’s HQ. They hover, pretty consistently, at an average of 80%, says Milnes. And that’s every day of the week. The Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday trend doesn’t tend to transfer into the world of research and development. ‘Scientists don’t know when it’s Friday,’ he smiles.

Supply and demand

With the right vision, designer and resources, the opportunities to deliver a fresh tranche of modern, human-centred life sciences spaces are vast, as current demand for workspace in this sector far outstrips supply. A report by real estate consultancy Cushman & Wakefield showed that vacancy rates for lab space stood at just 1.3% in Cambridge and 4.8% in Oxford at the end of 2024. And, with competition for talent and investment so high, Bicycle Therapeutics is not the only example of a life sciences building breaking the traditional, clinical mold.

“We need around 100% more lab space in London”– Dr Angela Kukula, MedCity

With 27.5m sq ft of space currently in the development pipeline across the Golden Triangle alone according to Savills, the next generation of modern life sciences space is hitting the market from Scott Brownrigg’s Daubeny Project – a three-storey lab space complete with café and coworking space due to complete for the Oxford Science Park in 2026 – to Sheppard Robson’s flexible campus in Melbourn, Cambridgeshire for science incubator TTP. Further afield, a new global oral health innovation centre is currently under development in Weybridge in Surrey. Also designed by Sheppard Robson, the scheme will see walkways for chance conversations woven in and around lab spaces.

It’s the same story in London, says Dr Angela Kukula, chief executive of MedCity, an initiative set up in 2014 to promote and grow the life sciences in the UK capital. ‘There is a huge undersupply of lab space in London,’ she says. ‘Our most recent report showed there is currently around a million square feet of demand in the city compared to half a million square feet of supply, so we need around 100% more space.’

This space, she adds, doesn’t have to all be clustered around the capital’s best-known life sciences hubs. ‘Most people think of the Knowledge Quarter and The Crick around King’s Cross, Canary Wharf and Imperial College’s White City Campus. But there are other, up-and-coming areas, including Sutton, which is where the London Cancer Hub is based and the SC1 Innovation District in south central London.’

It is a common theme. The entire life sciences sector across the UK, from the well-known hotspots to the lesser-known emerging hubs, including Manchester, Birmingham and Newcastle, is in dire need of fresh, modern space that will deliver a lifestyle as well as lab space.

The good news is that the real estate and design sectors are motivated to deliver. And they are bringing both the life sciences community and the general public along for the ride. ‘The buildings, spaces and places have become so much more open over the last two decades,’ says MedCity’s Kukula. ‘With more thought now being given to the occupants, that extends more widely to local communities. Once it was a case of a life sciences building being dropped into their midst only for it to be out of bounds. These days they can actually be somewhere to visit, go to the café and be somewhere that local people, or their children, might aspire to work someday.’

For a sector in need of 145,000 extra people over the next decade, you don’t get much better advertising than that.

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