Report Uncovers Huge Depth of Local Screen Industries

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Professor Emily Caston says they form a single convergent supply chain

The report was launched at an event at Ealing Studios. Picture: Ealing Studios

March 18, 2026

The West London Screens report, authored by Professor Emily Caston of the University of West London and published this week, makes the case that the contribution of local screen industries to the national economy is much greater than is generally realised.

The report, which was funded by the government and six local authorities, encompasses film, television, games, screen advertising, virtual production, immersive media and digital content — constitute a nationally strategic production ecosystem that has been systematically underestimated by conventional economic measurement. The report was launched at Ealing Studios, itself a fitting venue given the site's central role in the cluster's story. Across nine boroughs including Hounslow, Ealing and Hammersmith & Fulham, the report identifies 6,842 companies with a combined turnover of £74.5 billion and an estimated annual growth rate of 3.3%, figures the author argues are themselves likely an undercount. The cluster accounts for 34% of London's screen enterprises and 14.5% of the national total, with GVA per employee of £71,773 signalling the high-value nature of the activity concentrated here.

The report's central argument is that these industries function not as three separate sectors but as a single convergent supply chain, and that West London is the only place in the UK where every tier of that chain — from commissioning through production, post-production and distribution — exists in one contiguous geography. The cluster's distinctive character comes from what the report calls its polycentric village structure: historically distinct production communities at Ealing, Shepherd's Bush, White City, Hammersmith, Southall, Isleworth and Hounslow's Golden Mile, integrated over 125 years through dense face-to-face supply chain relationships and, critically, through public transport.

Professor Caston states, "Until now, the true scale of West London's screen industries has never been fully mapped. This report reveals a convergent ecosystem of extraordinary depth and reach — spanning film, TV, advertising, games, live events, post-production and visual effects — that is shaping screen culture globally. Its economic weight demands serious attention from investors and policymakers alike."

The report emphasises that West London functions not as a competitor to regional screen hubs but as their enabling infrastructure. Major studios and streamers based here channel billions through local production companies and post-production houses, enabling shoots and supply-chain activity nationwide. This is evidenced by productions such as Bridgerton, The Rings of Power and The Crown filming locally, while West London-commissioned productions such as Mr Bates vs The Post Office and Adolescence were made primarily on location in Wales and the North of England. The cluster is, in this sense, the national hub that makes regional production possible.

For Hounslow specifically, the report's findings are particularly significant. In terms of current economic weight, Hounslow is identified as a meaningful contributor to Tier 1 production, with 29 production companies and £119 million in turnover, though it sits some way behind Westminster and Hammersmith & Fulham in that tier. More striking is Hounslow's importance in the technology supply chain. Brompton Technology, located on Gunnersbury Avenue in Chiswick, is presented as a Tier 4 case study and described as the UK market leader in LED video processing systems for virtual production, live events and broadcast. Its Tessera processors have been used on productions ranging from the BBC's Dinosaurs: The Final Day with David Attenborough to Taylor Swift's Wembley stadium shows, and the report makes a case for targeted public investment in Brompton as an innovation intermediary given its role in brokering relationships across the wider West London ecosystem.

The report also draws attention to SEGA Europe, whose headquarters moved in 2025 from Brentford to Chiswick Business Park. SEGA functions as a lead commissioning entity activating supply chains across the UK through its portfolio of studios including Creative Assembly in Horsham, Sports Interactive (Football Manager), Hardlight in Leamington Spa and Two Point Studios in Farnham. The report explicitly uses SEGA as an illustration of how West London's games publishers, alongside CAPCOM in Hammersmith and Warner Bros Games in Soho, operate as command nodes whose publishing and financing decisions distribute employment and creative activity across the country.

Between 2014 and 2024, the number of screen and creative industry enterprises in the borough of Hounslow fell slightly from 640 to 630, a modest decline at a time when the nine-borough cluster as a whole grew by 9% and the UK grew by 27%. This relative stagnation is a concern the report implicitly addresses through its infrastructure and investment recommendations, particularly around the Golden Mile.

Gillette Studios, the Grade II-listed Gillette Factory on the Great West Road, has already hosted ten major productions since 2013 under The Vinyl Factory's stewardship, including Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, Bohemian Rhapsody and Allied. In March 2025, Hounslow Council approved a major expansion adding six new sound stages with specialised capabilities in film, digital content and virtual production. The report frames this as the borough's most strategically important screen industry development, and places it within a wider opportunity narrative centred on the Golden Mile's Art Deco architecture, which it argues offers a distinctive competitive advantage over the standard industrial shed conversions that dominate much of London's studio expansion, precisely because US studios and streaming platforms have demonstrated a preference for heritage-led creative developments.

If the Golden Mile is properly developed and marketed, the report suggests it could become West London's equivalent of Shoreditch's Old Street cluster, but positioned at the premium end of the market. Cllr Tom Bruce, Deputy Leader of Hounslow Council, reflects this ambition saying, "West London is one of the UK's most important centres for the screen industries, and Hounslow is proud to play a key role in that success. Our borough is home to a growing cluster of TV, film and digital media businesses, particularly along the Golden Mile London, which is a major focus for regeneration and investment. We are committed to supporting the creative industries as a key engine of growth for Hounslow — creating skilled jobs, supporting local businesses and strengthening our cultural economy."

The report also uncovers a major unacknowledged heritage asset in Isleworth Studios at Worton Hall, which opened in 1914 with the first British screen adaptation of Sherlock Holmes and went on to host some of the most significant productions in British cinema history. Under Alexander Korda's stewardship in the 1930s it produced Things to Come, while its final years saw the tank sequences for The African Queen featuring Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn filmed there rather than on location in Africa due to safety concerns, and Richard Burton made his screen debut there. Despite all of this, the site now carries no heritage recognition whatsoever — a gap the report identifies as both a cultural loss and an untapped strategic asset.

For Ealing, the picture is one of a borough with extraordinary heritage pedigree and solid contemporary infrastructure. Ealing Studios, which opened in 1902, is presented as an exemplary model of heritage as living infrastructure — a working studio where contemporary productions are made within a built environment inseparable from one of Britain's most celebrated filmmaking traditions. The press release describes it as the oldest continuously working film studio in the world, a distinction that anchors the borough's identity within the cluster.

The BBC operated the studios from 1955 to 1995, using them for landmark productions including Doctor Who from 1963 and Colditz, before the site returned to commercial film production. Cllr Peter Mason, Leader of Ealing Council, says, "Our borough has historically played an outsized role in the sector thanks to Ealing Studios, the oldest continuously working film studio in the world, and its outstanding new facilities. It is one of the reasons why the wider west London region is firmly established as a global film and TV destination and a national centre for the industry's supply chain. It has delivered good quality jobs for our residents for decades. Professor Caston's research shows that this is just the start, with west London primed to lead the way with film and TV for decades to come. We will continue to work with other boroughs, the Old Oak and Park Royal Development Corporation, and businesses to support the industry to flourish even more and continue to deliver good jobs for local people."

Fragile Films, based at Ealing Studios, is presented as a 1 case study in the report illustrating the kind of high-quality mid-budget independent production that depends on the cluster's accumulated infrastructure and relationships, with credits including Spiceworld, An Ideal Husband and various ITV television dramas. Panavision, a major camera and lighting equipment specialist, is also featured as a study also based in Ealing. Enterprise count data shows Ealing experienced a slight fall from 1,095 to 1,080 companies in the screen industries between 2019 and 2024. Southall Studios, which operated from 1924 to 1958 and produced films with Richard Attenborough, Dirk Bogarde and Diana Dors before closing with no physical trace remaining, is highlighted as a striking example of heritage erasure, particularly given Southall's current significance as a centre of British Asian cinema through the work of filmmakers such as Gurinder Chadha.

Hammersmith & Fulham emerges from the report as the second most economically significant borough in the cluster after Westminster, with 156 production companies, 2,100 PAYE employees and £778 million in turnover at Tier 1 alone. ITV's White City operation is presented as a major case study: a complex creative and operational headquarters where programmes are conceived, commissioned, produced, packaged, broadcast and monetised, functioning as a hub for strategy and commissioning decisions around ITVX as well as a production base for daytime, entertainment, factual and scripted programming. Banijay Entertainment, headquartered in the W14 area, is the other major Hammersmith & Fulham case study: one of the world's largest independent television content groups, owning formats including Big Brother, MasterChef, Peaky Blinders and Rogue Heroes, and operating as a centralised hub for UK strategy, deal-making, development and global coordination from West London while delivering production across a network of independent labels nationwide.

CAPCOM, the Japanese games publisher, is based in the centre of Hammersmith, further reinforcing the borough’s role as a concentration of lead commissioning and publishing entities. Enterprise count data shows the borough actually lost 160 companies between 2014 and 2024, a 12% decline and the worst performance of any borough in the cluster, implying that despite the impressive concentration of major companies the broader ecosystem of smaller businesses has been contracting.

Cutting across all three boroughs, several themes in the report carry particular weight. The proposed West London Orbital rail link — a new London Overground line running approximately eleven miles from Hendon in the north to Hounslow in the south via Neasden, Harlesden, Old Oak Common, Acton and Brentford — is identified as potentially the most significant infrastructure opportunity for the cluster in a generation. In March 2026, TfL and the London Boroughs of Hounslow, Ealing, Brent and Barnet jointly committed £6.65 million to progress the scheme into detailed design and consultation. For all three boroughs, the WLO would for the first time provide direct rail connections between the cluster's principal production nodes without requiring workers to travel into central London and back out, transforming what are currently fragmented assets into a fully integrated creative district. The report frames investment in this transport link explicitly as direct investment in screen production capacity.

The freelance crisis affects all three boroughs severely, with 68% of UK screen freelancers not working as of early 2025. Business rates increases of up to 600% following the 2023 revaluation are placing particular pressure on independent studios and smaller facilities operators across the area. On the opportunity side, the Independent Film Tax Credit launched in April 2025 has already generated a 27% increase in BFI certification applications, and the UK-India Free Trade Agreement signed in July 2025 opens substantial co-production possibilities, with Yash Raj Films already committing to three Bollywood productions at UK locations from 2026 — a development with obvious potential given the long-established South Asian cultural presence in Ealing and Hounslow in particular.

The renaissance of advertising-funded content, driven by the rapid growth of ad-supported streaming tiers at Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon, presents renewed demand for West London's screen advertising production sector, which had faced structural decline as linear television advertising collapsed.

On the threat side, the concentration of 65% of UK film production spend in five US studios and three streaming platforms creates structural exposure to American policy shifts, including the Trump administration's 2025 signals about potential 100% tariffs on films produced outside the US. Intensifying competition from Canada and Australia — both of which have escalated their tax incentive packages — is also squeezing the UK's competitive position, with a 2025 industry survey placing Toronto first and Vancouver third as preferred filming locations, with the UK second between them.

The report's strategic recommendations centre on developing a unified West London cluster identity marketed under an Elizabeth Line Screen Spine brand; a comprehensive West London Screen Heritage Audit, with heritage reviews already underway in both Ealing and Hounslow; establishing Freelance Worker Hubs in underutilised local buildings; reforming business rates for screen industry facilities; creating a West London Screen Innovation Consortium linking the production ecosystem with the University of West London, Brunel, Royal Holloway and Middlesex University; and a two-tier filming permit fee structure offering concessionary rates to productions qualifying under the Independent Film Tax Credit, complemented by a cluster-wide supply chain discount scheme covering studios, camera hire, costume houses, transportation and post-production. All of these require coordinated action across borough boundaries, and the report argues that the current absence of a unified cluster identity and cross-borough governance framework represents the single most significant policy gap holding back what is already, functionally, Britain's essential screen production engine.

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