Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in Oxfordshire has revealed that they will be working to refurbish the legacy RAF buildings on the site with the intention of creating new facilities. This refurbishment has been planned following the £7.4 million funding that has been granted by Santander Corporate & Commercial. It is thought that this project will see a number of new businesses relocating to the new facility as well as the possible extension of those already at the site and the creation. This refurbishment project could also see the creation of thousands of new jobs.

In the 1940s the site at Harwell was a World War 2 RAF air base. Nowadays it is dedicated to science and technology and offers a mixture of world class facilities, supercomputer resources and open source national laboratories. The research and testing that takes place on the campus covers five sectors off work. These sectors include space and satellite applications, life sciences and healthtec, big data and supercomputing, energy and the environment, and advanced engineering and materials. It is thought that more than 5,000 people work at the campus stretched across over 200 organisations.

There will be a focus on the physical expansion of the compass over the course of the next few years and it is thought that around one million square feet of new buildings have been planned and will be constructed over the next five years. These planned developments will include a variety of buildings for industrial, office and laboratory purposes.

Santander Corporate & Commercial has worked with the campus in order to offer a number of different funding options over the years that has allowed Harwell to build more facilities including office space and laboratories. This latest funding package focuses on refurbishing the dated RAF buildings on the campus in order to create a new headquarters as well as more office space that will be let out.