Swindon

Swindon, a town of around 230,000 people in Wiltshire on the M4 corridor between Bristol and London, is where Portuguese-founded drone maker Tekever is opening Britain's largest drone manufacturing facility by footprint. The 254,000 sq ft site, revealed alongside disclosure of Tekever's GBP270 million in prior Ministry of Defence contracts, is due to open in summer 2026 and will build the larger AR5 uncrewed aerial system alongside expanded AR3 production; Tekever's existing AR3 ISR drone has logged more than 50,000 operational hours in Ukraine.

Swindon has been a manufacturing and engineering town since the 19th century, built around the former Great Western Railway works; more recently it has been better known as a corporate and logistics hub, home to Honda's UK car plant until its 2021 closure and to national headquarters including Nationwide and WHSmith. The Tekever facility occupies The Spectrum Building, a Grade II-listed Norman Foster-designed landmark, and forms part of Tekever's wider GBP400 million, five-year OVERMATCH investment programme across its UK sites.

The factory is expected to create around 1,000 skilled manufacturing and engineering jobs, positioning Swindon as a centre of the UK's drone-industrial build-out at a moment when government procurement (the Defence Investment Plan, LEAP/LCADE) is trying to convert funding commitments into contracted production. For a town that lost its largest car-industry employer in 2021, the factory is a concrete replacement of manufacturing capacity with a defence-tech rather than automotive base.