I grew up in the North, spent twenty years working in Oxfordshire, and now lead a robotics collaboration rooted in West Cumbria. That path has given me a clear view of something the UK still struggles with: where you are shapes what gets built around you. When you are close to London, investment and attention tend to find you. When you are in a place like Cumbria, they do not as easily.
Cumbria is not a marginal place. It is home to Sellafield, one of the most complex nuclear sites in Europe, and to decades of hard-won nuclear expertise, as well as leading defence player BAE Systems in Barrow. Yet Cumbria is remote, transport connections are poor, and getting people to make the journey can be challenging. The result is a county that matters enormously but is too easily overlooked when decisions about investment and capability are made. Place-based initiatives are how we change that – and Cumbria is becoming a case study in what they can achieve.
What we mean by ‘place-based'
A place-based approach starts from a simple idea: capability is not evenly distributed across the country, and it should not be funded as if it were. Rather than backing a technology or a sector in the abstract, you anchor investment in a specific region – its industries, its institutions, its workforce and its existing strengths – and build outward from there.
In practice, that means growing a cluster around a particular industry or technology focus area: combining R&D, skills and supply chains. Proximity lets ideas, people and equipment move quickly between labs, training centres and operational sites. It is more than an investment in a region, it is something that stays there, compounds over time, and draws people and further investment in.
Devolution could accelerate this. As Cumbria moves towards its first elected mayor and a combined authority with its own investment fund, the region will have more say over how money for skills, transport and growth is spent – and potentially greater fiscal powers. More local decision-making should boost clusters.
Robotics in Cumbria
In Cumbria, we are growing a robotics ecosystem with a big focus on hazardous environments such as nuclear decommissioning.
This has emerged thanks to a series of collaborations – combining government, industry and universities. Examples include ACORN, which sits at the research end, funding the early work that provides technology proof of concept. RAICo adapts and deploys robots into the decommissioning environments of its members – which include Sellafield and the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA).
The Industrial Solutions Hub (iSH), based out of Cleator Moor, leads the Cumbria Robotics Cluster, which connects local companies with each other, identifies commercial opportunities in nuclear and adjacent sectors, and aims to develop a thriving robotics community in the region.
CROSS, our new robotics skills centre based at the National College for Nuclear and Clean Energy in Lilyhall, will build the workforce it all depends on, training the next generation of operators locally rather than importing them.
What that produces is tangible. RAICo has produced technologies that solve real decommissioning needs – many from Sellafield, just down the road – which are now being deployed on nuclear sites. These range from robotic contamination swabbing, to training simulators and smart digital assistants for robot operators.
Partnerships are forming as shared regional challenges bring more organisations together. Cockermouth-based Createc has joined forces with AtkinsRéalis to deliver Auto-SAS, an NDA-funded system to autonomously sort and segregate radioactive waste. Four noted Cumbrian engineering SMEs – Forth, React Engineering, CORE Nuclear Solutions and Cumbria Operations and Maintenance Services – have come together to form Resolve Engineered Solutions, which pools skilled local professionals to bid for complex nuclear engineering contracts.
Places supporting other places
Place-based does not, however, mean going it alone. Finding synergies with other places is a key determinant of success.
Both RAICo and ACORN twin Cumbria with Oxfordshire. Cumbria brings nuclear heritage and a physical, high-stakes challenge in Sellafield. Oxford brings a broader innovation culture and a diversity of industrial sectors. That culture is not tied to a single mission, but for our purposes, is channelled through the lens of its nuclear heritage at Harwell, and its place at the centre of the global fusion industry, via the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) – another of RAICo's members. That crossover of cultures and related industries allows us to learn from each other and create something greater than the sum of its parts.
Another RAICo member is the University of Manchester, which hosts the Manchester Robotics and AI Centre, which now has an outpost at our RAICo1 facility in Whitehaven. That relationship allows Cumbrian robotics innovators to benefit from the world-leading robotics expertise not just at Manchester, but through its UK-wide academic network.
I spent much of my career in technology transfer, where one lesson became clear: no organisation is innovative enough within its own four walls. Progress comes from reaching beyond them – across institutions, sectors and regions. Linking a delivery-focused county to a discovery-focused one turns two clusters into a single, stronger network that can solve problems together – a better use of public money than regions competing for the same pots.
A model for the places that get overlooked
These collaborations don't just create useful innovations, they lift the region. Some of that is tangible, such as outreach to schools and training initiatives. But there's also the softer value of having local organisations doing cutting-edge work in robotics and AI. It makes careers in those emerging industries feel accessible to people who live here, not just for a club of people who live in London, Oxford or Cambridge. It creates a sense that this is a region where things are possible, and self-belief is a major factor in a region's success or failure.
Specialisms spill over, too. Decommissioning has parallels with other high-stakes industries, and many of their representatives have visited RAICo1 to see how our robotics work might transfer.
I believe this model travels. A recent Manufacturing Technology Centre study of the world's leading robotics clusters – Odense, Baden-Württemberg, Singapore, Boston and Pittsburgh – found they share a recipe: a patient anchor, neutral conveners, shared infrastructure, a skills pipeline, and the cultural self-belief to back long-term bets. Cumbria has these ingredients. Pittsburgh, one of the world's foremost robotics hubs, traces its origins to robots sent into the radioactive basement of Three Mile Island. Its hazardous-environment nuclear challenges are similar to what we are working on today.
What is happening in Cumbria is not unique to nuclear decommissioning, or to Cumbria. Many regions – especially those often labelled ‘left-behind' – have a defining industry or institution to build a cluster around the same way: anchor it in a genuine local strength, connect research to deployment to skills, and link that cluster to key nodes in a wider national network.
This is what we are doing collectively in Cumbria. The organisations highlighted in this article, amongst others, are coming together to build on our heritage and make the county a national name in nuclear robotics, stimulating regional growth, solving national decommissioning challenges, and creating capability the whole country can draw on.
Kirsty Hewitson is director of RAICo, the Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Collaboration
