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EXCLUSIVE: The birthplace of Britpop and countless bands, Camden has music cred in spades. Now the team behind the Camden Film Quarter wants to create a neighborhood that also moves to the thrum of movie and TV production.
Yoo Capital is the real estate investment firm with the plans, which are now in the public domain. The company’s Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Lloyd Lee, unpacked the vision in an exclusive sit-down with Deadline.
The topline: Studio facilities, jobs, and a new neighborhood rooted in film and TV. “We came up with a narrative that if we created 50% affordable housing, jobs in film and television, educational opportunities in film and television, and public spaces, those are fundamental pillars that we can get on with,” Lee says.
Visiting the site for the Camden Film Quarter reveals a hodgepodge of industrial outlets, a recycling center and not much else. If the plans are realized, there will soon be a world-class film and TV-focused neighborhood welcoming the world’s best movie makers, skilling-up a new generation of filmmakers and craft people and letting the public see some of the workings along the way. Lee sums it up thusly: “We’re literally taking a section of the centermost piece of London and we’re creating a whole new film quarter.”
Location, Location, Location
Kentish Town is in the London Borough of Camden. It’s where the UK’s new Prime Minister Kier Starmer called home before moving into Downing Street last month per British political protocol. Yoo has bought eight acres of land in the area from Camden Council for the Film Quarter. There will be up to a dozen soundstages, a National Film & Television School campus, offices, and housing, half of which will be designated as affordable.
The definition of London is often stretched to include areas on the city’s outskirts or even further afield, but Kentish Town is bang in the heart of the English capital, with fast links to major London airports and well served by rail and underground networks.
Lee knows the location is a USP. “If you look at the clock around the M25 [the motorway that encircles London], most studios are on the outer perimeter, whereas we’re almost center of it – the industry has told us that’s very powerful,” he says. “You’re creating a better experience for people, and there are not thousands of cars and people driving.”
In terms of London’s wider cultural scene, Yoo Capital is behind the redevelopment of the Saville Theatre, also in the Borough of Camden. In 2028 it will become the first permanent UK home of Cirque du Soleil. It is also redeveloping Olympia in west London as part of a project that includes a new AEG 4,400-seat music venue, a 1,500-seat theater from The Trafalgar Group, and a Wetherby Arts performing arts school.
A strength of the urban setting for the Camden Film Quarter is the public transport infrastructure, but the realities of production mean there will also be a requirement for a volume of traffic coming onto the site. “You cannot expect the Titanic to arrive on the tube, they’re going to have to come in a truck,” Lee says – and this is where Yoo Capital will implement a system it pioneered at Olympia. It uses tech to manage the arrivals and reduce dwell times of any vehicle, which is both more efficient and sustainable.
The Camden Masterplan
A masterplan has been published for the Camden Film Quarter. It is a big-picture overview of the project with detailed designs to follow at the end of the year. The hope is planning permission is forthcoming in early 2025, meaning work could start in the second half of the year. Soundstages could come onstream from 2027 and the first phase of the project be completed in 2028 or 2029.
There will be between eight and 12 soundstages in the first phase. In success, more could follow: “It’s a prudent balance, it’s got enough critical mass that people will take it seriously,” Lee says. “If it turns out in generation two that they are full then we will go into another eight or 10, or one of our neighbors will do that, and that’s okay.”
The Olympia redevelopment has a price tag of about £1.3BN ($1.7BN) and the Camden Film Quarter will also require chunky investment. Lee notes that it’s hard to talk precise figures at this stage but tells Deadline: “People have asked us whether we would be prepared to invest a billion sterling (US$1.3BN) if that was required and we’ve said the answer is yes.”
The soundstages will sit cheek by jowl with public spaces and the idea is to pull back the curtain and make people feel part of the action. “For anyone not in the industry, film and television is magic, there’s something special about it,” Lee says. “Given the size and scale of the Camden Film Quarter and the acreage, we have the ability to create perimeters, which will basically be for soundstages and production and will obviously only be accessible by the industry. But inside the Camden Film Quarter, it’s totally open to the public.”
Given its location in a densely populated part of London that already attracts an enormous number of visitors, the public-facing part of the plan stacks up. It will take in dedicated spaces and tours, says Lee. “Film and television is not just about production, it is for an audience. If you’re in the Film Quarter, and you’re in central London, we also think it’s both exciting and responsible that we ensure that the public also gets to grab onto a piece.
“I think that you could see a family coming to do a studio tour, see how movies are made and going into spaces where someone was filming, seeing golf carts go back and forth. They should feel like they’re in the film and television corner of London.”
Destination UK & Bridging The Skills Gap
The UK has numerous new, legacy and upcoming studio facilities. Despite the premium TV market cooling, the demand is still there. Netflix occupies space at Shepperton and Longcross and Disney has Pinewood. Amazon announced last week it is buying Bray Studios. Meanwhile, Warner Bros. has Leavesden and Comcast has Sky Studios Elstree. Peaky Blinders’ scribe Steven Knight is behind a new complex in Birmingham, and Fulwell 73 is creating a new site in Sunderland. These will rub shoulders with other sites such as Bad Wolf Studios in Wales and Shinfield in Berkshire.
For producers, a savvy workforce, sound infrastructure and a competitive tax incentive of up to 40% make the UK an attractive destination. For talent, it’s invariably a nice spot too. But Lee acknowledges there’s no point having pristine studio spaces without the people needed to make them work. A new NFTS campus within the Camden Film Quarter will blood a new generation of talent. As well as sending a strong message to the local community and would-be students, the NFTS component speaks to filling the skills gap, which is top of mind at an industry level.
“Investment in state-of-the-art film and TV studios and comprehensive skills training is essential for the UK to maintain its status as a dominant global player; this will help attract inward investment, meet the domestic demand for high-quality productions, and provide essential training for our creative community,” Georgia Brown tells Deadline. The former Amazon Studios Europe topper was voluntary chair of the high-level Skills Task Force convened to address the workforce issue. “Ensuring our infrastructure and talent pool remain competitive is crucial for sustaining the UK’s influence and success on the world stage,” she says.
Industry Buzz
Yoo Capital is aiming to create a space that chimes with the people making productions tick. “It has to really speak to a whole broad spectrum of the industry and that is about getting to work, being in the office, or the soundstage, or the production facilities. It’s about ‘do I love being here?’ because when you make a commitment to any career, but particularly film and television, it’s a way of life.”
The idea is that related businesses will cluster around the Camden Film Quarter. “It’s not like financial services, where you have these enormous behemoths who take 1,000,000 ft2 shiny office towers, you have hundreds of small-to-medium-sized businesses and that’s marketing, sound, engineering, props, special effects, animation,” says Lee.
“We think a more appropriate way to build the fabric of the community is to create a kind of a beehive working yard of spaces where businesses of that scale can be next to each other. That creates a buzz of activity. It also means that the big industry players are going to say, well, that’s a lot of our partnership base, it’s the small-to-medium-sized companies that we work with on our major productions every day. Everything’s in the neighborhood.”
Yoo Capital is aiming high, but Lee is keen to note the Camden Film Quarter is “not a sprawling Ozymandias type thing… it’s just a properly done campus with the right numbers.”
That said, with so much on the line, the level of ambition is evident. Lee says: “Does it become one of the most sought-after studio campuses in the world? Maybe, why shouldn’t it? London, and the UK, is a market where everyone wants to be – why wouldn’t far away the best [studio] location in all of London not therefore be everyone’s number one choice? It has to be right, but that’s the aspiration.”
He adds: “We think that London has the opportunity to say to the world: ‘You want to come and do your best work, come here, this is what we do.’”
