The development will help create a globally significant innovation district in Northeast Cambridge. Consultation events will take place this week, including a public exhibition and a Science Showcase, a day of interactive science experiments for children, both designed to gather feedback to inform a more detailed masterplan.
Guided by The Crown Estate’s purpose to deliver lasting and shared prosperity for the nation, the proposed masterplan reimagines Cambridge Business Park as a highly sustainable, inclusive, and engaging destination. It will create spaces for innovators to attract investment and scale, while testing new ideas to benefit wider society. The masterplan will be brought forward in phases spanning a c.15-year period, combining refurbished, retrofitted, and new buildings, while significantly enhancing green space, biodiversity, and public access.
Key ambitions of the emerging proposals include:
- Creating over 5,000 new jobs across broad sectors, with a focus on targeting growth areas that will have a positive social impact, such as cleantech and planetary health.
- Delivering more than 350 new homes to support housing needs in the area.
- Providing skills and education programmes to open pathways into careers in the science, innovation and technology sectors.
- Establishing part of a new high street that animates Cambridge Business Park for customers and the wider community, including new public and cultural amenities.
- Enhancing sustainable travel with better cycle routes, and improved connections to the guided busway and the rest of the Innovation District and neighbourhoods.
- Offering new leisure, sport, and community facilities to support community wellbeing.
- Increasing open space and biodiversity, with new watercourses, green routes and a rewilded public realm.
- Aiming to exceed industry standards for sustainability and wellbeing including targeting WELL, BREEAM and NABERS certifications.
- Providing sustainable water management solutions embedded throughout, resulting in a targeted 55% reduction in water usage.
- Extensive use of recycled and repurposed materials across the site, promoting circularity.
The Crown Estate has already begun delivering its ambitious on-site social impact strategy at Cambridge Business Park and recently celebrated the opening of a new, Charity Hub, which will be in place for a fixed period to provide a subsidised home to several local charities that deliver important work for local communities, while it develops the long-term plans for the park.
In the short term, The Crown Estate is exploring the delivery of a new innovation hub located within a retrofitted building on-site. It could support early-stage, purpose-led businesses with labs, co-working space, and experimental landscapes that will act as a testbed for new and sustainable practices.
Matthew Sampson, Regeneration Director at The Crown Estate, said:
“Cambridge Business Park has a key role to play in shaping the next chapter of Northeast Cambridge. Our vision is to bridge national mission-led innovation and local social impact, through supporting science and innovation that tackles major challenges – like planetary health – while delivering meaningful opportunities for local people.“Through our evolving plans and initiatives like the new Charity Hub, we want to show how investment can create places that are not just productive and economically significant, but inclusive, sustainable and which deliver a range of benefits for local communities. This consultation is a chance to help shape our economic, social and environmental ambitions.”
The Crown Estate is encouraging local residents, businesses and political stakeholders to have their say both in-person and online. The public exhibition will take place on Wednesday 4 June from 4 – 8 pm and the Science Showcase on Saturday 7 June from 10am – 2pm, supported by Cambridge Science Centre and customers on Cambridge Business Park. Feedback gathered will help refine the masterplan ahead of further engagement in early 2026, before being submitted to Cambridge City Council.
To view the proposals and take part in the consultation, visit: https://cambridgebusinesspark.commonplace.is/
