All of the UK's cities - apart from museums like Oxford and Cambridge - are full of real estate investment sprawl. There is no reason some of those spaces couldn't be used as labs and light factories. In fact there are plenty of brown field conversion projects turning old mills (etc) into new light industry hubs.

The bigger problems in the UK are business rates (extortionate), profiteering by landlords and land owners, insanely expensive utilities, crumbling physical infrastructure, and Brexit.

We could have had a government that invested/fixed in all of those things, but the big landords and land owners decided they didn't like that idea. They'd prefer to keep the country struggling and backward, because it appeals to their sense of aristocratic self-importance.