Added: 6 days ago by Isembard
London, UK: Isembard today announces the opening of its new global headquarters and factory in Southwark, central London — the largest factory to open in the capital since the Second World War. This announcement comes as the company expects to raise significant additional funding to support its ambitious expansion plans on a global scale, having grown revenue by ten times year over year in the last twelve months.
Component manufacturing is a market worth $1.8 trillion a year, yet small businesses account for 95% of production and are rapidly disappearing: the average owner is over 65, and 40% plan to retire within five years. This erosion of industrial capacity is colliding with surging demand from aerospace, defence, energy and robotics companies driven by re-shoring and rising spending on critical industries. Isembard's model — combining owned and franchisee factories with its proprietary agentic operating system, MasonOS — is built to close that gap, giving exceptional operators the technology, brand, engineering standards and customer demand to run high-performance manufacturing businesses from day one.
The Southwark site will serve as Isembard's global head office alongside a working precision factory, producing components for aerospace, defence and robotics customers, including Anduril, Babcock and Tekever, just a few minutes from Westminster and the City. The purpose behind the location and scale of the manufacturing operation is to tap into London’s vast technology talent pool combined with daily proximity to the operational reality of running a large scale production site.
The factory houses an array of 3-axis and 5-axis milling machines, turn-mills, and wire electrical discharge machines, alongside a climate-controlled metrology lab. The office overlooks the factory floor through floor-to-ceiling windows, giving Isembard's software and robotics engineers a direct, real-time view of production as they develop MasonOS and the company's forthcoming robotics technology.
Isembard expects headcount at the Southwark HQ to grow from 35 today to 200 by the end of 2027, spanning production, software, manufacturing and robotics automation engineering alongside wider support functions for the group's factory network.
The opening caps Isembard's fastest year of growth to date. The company has gone from 4 factories at the start of 2026 to 16 today, opening its first sites in continental Europe, in France and Germany, and onboarding 10 new franchise operators. Isembard is targeting 100 owned and franchisee factories across the UK alone by the end of 2028, a programme expected to create 2,200 high-skilled jobs.
Southwark was chosen for its industrial history as much as its location. The borough was one of London's manufacturing centres for centuries, with foundries, engineering works, printworks and tanneries clustered around Bankside and Bermondsey, and wharves and dockyards along the river handling goods bound for the rest of the country. It is also where Isambard Kingdom Brunel — the engineer after whom the company is named — spent his early career driving the Thames Tunnel out from Rotherhithe.
The announcement comes as the Prime Minister has committed to reindustrialising Britain and to using defence investment to create skilled jobs across the country. The Defence Investment Plan commits close to £300bn and names sovereign capability, autonomous systems and resilient supply chains among its priorities, putting domestic manufacturing capacity at the centre of national security policy.
Alexander Fitzgerald, Founder and CEO of Isembard, said:
"Manufacturing is the origin of our security, prosperity and sense of purpose as nations. No one has opened a factory like this in London since the Second World War and that tells you how far our industrial base has been allowed to shrink. Bringing production back onshore is the work of the next decade. What we need now are the brightest engineering minds of our generation to join us. Engineers, you have nothing to lose but your chains!".
Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds said:
"This is exactly what reindustrialising Britain is all about. Bringing manufacturing back into the UK, backing our critical industries and creating highly skilled jobs across the country.
"It is my mission to create the conditions that businesses need to invest and expand in the UK, to drive growth and opportunity in every postcode. This exciting news from Isembard marks a huge vote of confidence in that ambition."
