On Thursday, 2 July, we sat down to dinner in the Brunel Boardroom (Brunel’s own office, and one of the oldest railway terminuses in the world) with 22 people who have shaped Engine Shed’s story over the last 13 years and who continue to shape the future innovation ecosystem.
It felt like the right way to begin saying goodbye.
Why we did it
Engine Shed closes its doors later this year, as its spirit and community move a few hundred metres east into the University of Bristol’s new Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus. As part of a series of activities to mark the closure and set course for the future, we wanted one quieter, more considered evening: a chance to gather the people who took the early risks, built the relationships, and shaped what this building became, and to ask them, honestly, what it all meant.
So we invited civic leaders, funders, founders and long-standing partners including some who’ve been part of the story since day one in 2013, some much more recently, for a three-course dinner and a conversation structured around three questions: how do you feel connected to Engine Shed? What impact has it had? And what still needs to be done, as its legacy moves into a new home?
What came out of it
Thirteen years compressed into one evening produced exactly the kind of conversation you’d hope for – funny, candid, occasionally emotional, and genuinely wide-ranging. A few things came through clearly.
Engine Shed was never really a plan. It grew from a handful of people across the council, the university and the wider business community taking a calculated risk on a tired old building, backed by instinct rather than a business case. Nobody involved at the start could say exactly what the outcome would be – and that absence of a rigid blueprint, more than one guest argued, is exactly what let it become what it became. It left room for trust to build between people, not institutions.
Its impact is written into the city around it. This is where UnitDX had its early support and grew into Science Creates. Where techSPARK held its first board meeting. Where SETsquared, now approaching its 25th anniversary, has called home. Guests from the investment community spoke about companies that would otherwise have relocated to Cambridge without the right lab and incubation space here. As one guest put it, almost every founder in Bristol has, in some way, been touched by this building.
The culture – the permission to walk in without an invitation, the informality, the sense that this belonged to everyone and no one – came up as the real legacy, more than the bricks. Guests talked about a building that never quite felt like a university space or a council space or a corporate one, and how that in-between quality was what let people in who might not otherwise have felt a conversation about innovation and enterprise was meant for them. More than one guest admitted that the walk from the front door to the boardroom routinely takes far longer than it should, simply because of how many people stop you to talk along the way.
There was real warmth, too, for what comes next. Guests were enthusiastic about the University of Bristol’s investment in the Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus – delivered on time and on budget on a notoriously difficult site – and its deliberately open, mixed-use design, bringing research, teaching, enterprise and community space under one roof. Alongside that excitement sat some honest, practical questions: how to protect affordable, flexible workspace as the area develops around it; how to make sure the breadth of businesses Engine Shed supported still has a home; and how to make sure opportunity reaches every part of the city, not just the postcode around the new campus. A question that came up more than once, and that we want to keep holding onto, was simply: who still isn’t in the room?
Which brings us to the research
That evening’s conversation is feeding directly into a piece of work we’re doing with the Brunel Centre, looking at the future of the innovation ecosystem across Greater Bristol – building on the 2017 SQW report that shaped so much of what came after.
A short survey, open to anyone with a stake in this ecosystem, will be live soon. We want as many voices in it as possible – not just the people who were lucky enough to be at that dinner table, but the wider community Engine Shed was always meant to serve. Keep an eye on this space, and on our socials, for the link. The full findings will be published in October.
Complete the survey here, it’ll take 10 minutes: https://uniofbath.questionpro.eu/legacy-of-engine-shed
Engine Shed is closing. What it built isn’t. We’d love you to be part of what comes next.