Bristol’s Flying Taxi’s
At the UK Private Capital South West Forum last week, Hargreaves Lansdown's Chief Product Officer Douglas Abbott said something that has been rattling round my head ever since: "Let's build a UK SpaceX." He was talking about how HL recently gave UK retail investors access to the SpaceX IPO for the first time, and lamenting that British innovation too rarely turns into world-beating, IPO-scale ambition.
Funny thing is, while he was saying it, four companies with roots in Bristol popped to mind who are already quietly trying to do something along those lines, but in the sky above us, not in orbit.
At the same conference, on a different panel: Bristol and the wider region were named as Europe's largest aerospace cluster and the UK's largest defence cluster, and by some measure, attracting more deep-tech investment than the Golden Triangle. That's not an accident. It's decades of Rolls-Royce, Airbus, and Leonardo alumni, four universities, and an ecosystem that, as one speaker put it '“has collaboration at its core.”