Isembard opens London’s largest factory since WWII

Isembard today announced 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 10 times year over year in the last 12 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 operators the technology, brand, engineering standards and customer demand to run high-performance manufacturing businesses from day one.

How a new home in Southwark will benefit from London’s tech talent pool

The Southwark site spans 160,000 sq ft and 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 three-axis and five-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.

Heading up a growing network of international manufacturing capacity

The opening caps Isembard’s fastest year of growth to date. The company has gone from four factories at the start of 2026 to 15 today, opening its first sites in continental Europe, in France and Germany and onboarding 10 new franchise operators.

Isembard factories globally:

• Carrollton Factory — Carrollton, TX, USA
• Des Moines Factory — Des Moines, Iowa, USA
• Exeter Factory — Exeter, UK
• HQ France — Paris, France
• HQ Germany — Hamburg, Germany
• HQ United Kingdom — London, UK
• HQ United States — Dallas, USA
• Leicester Factory — Leicester, UK
• Milton Keynes Factory — Milton Keynes, UK
• Park Royal Factory — Park Royal, London, UK
• Portsmouth Factory — Portsmouth, UK
• St Louis Factory — St Ann, Missouri, USA
• Swindon Factory — Swindon, UK
• Traverse City Factory — Lake Ann, Michigan, USA
• Youngstown Factory — Youngstown, Ohio, USA

Photo: Isembard

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.

Contributing to sovereign capability and the reindustrialisation of Britain

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 £300 billion and names sovereign capability, autonomous systems and resilient supply chains among its priorities, putting domestic manufacturing capacity at the centre of national security policy.

Photo: Isembard

Alexander Fitzgerald (above), 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.”