One year out from the opening of the Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus; we spoke to Vice-Chancellor Evelyn Welch about the “remarkable” space

Set to open in September 2026, the University of Bristol’s Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus is the university’s exciting new venture. On Tuesday, I was fortunate enough to tour the site and see for myself how the campus will enrich the University, its students, and the city in general.

The university is working alongside Bristol City Council to regenerate the Bristol Temple Quarter into a vibrant tech and engineering hub. The campus is a catalyst for the wider 135-hectare transformation of Bristol Temple Quarter, which aims to deliver 22,000 new jobs and 10,000 new homes, alongside new public and green spaces, and a £1.6 billion annual boost to the regional economy.

The building is located across from the University’s Temple Quarter Research Hub, which houses the University’s Bristol Digital Futures Institute (BDFI). It comes as Bristol University is championing developments in Technology, Artificial intelligence and cybersecurity. The University of Bristol was crowned the AI University of the year in 2024.

On my visit to the site on Tuesday, Chancellor Evelyn Welch and Deputy Vice-Chancellor and lead for the Temple Quarter Programme, Judith Squires, made it very clear how the new campus is not just exciting for the University but also for Bristol as a city. Judith Squires said the campus “is the catalyst for an area of regeneration that will transform this previously neglected area of Bristol into a vibrant place for our local communities.”

During my conversation with Evelyn Welch, she described the new campus as part of a “remarkable” regeneration project that will hugely benefit Bristol’s economic portfolio.

She continued that the new campus is a catalyst for the “new town” that will emerge in Temple Meads and become the “home of high-tech research and development.”

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Evelyn Welch spoke of her desire for this new campus to strongly influence the trajectory of Bristol University and become a defining feature of its life over “the next 150 years.”

When I asked her what this meant for Bristol University, she was excited by the prospect of Bristol becoming a leading university, stating, “I want the Oxford/Cambridge arc to be the Cambridge/Bristol arc with a stop off in Oxford.”

She also commented on how the new campus would see the university “coming down off the hill and into the heart of the city of Bristol.”

Her excitement about what this offered current and future students was palpable. Second and first-year Business, Engineering, and Innovation students will be able to use the campus from September 2026.

The building, 38,000 square meters in size, will house 4,600 students and 650 staff. The university hopes it will be a hub of world-class teaching and research across business, innovation, digital engineering, artificial intelligence and more.

Located right next to Temple Meads station, the Building will act as a place of work and study for over 7,000 people every day. A modern structure, it boasts 1,000 glass panels and 750 solar panels have been installed. Outside the building, 130 trees are being planted.

Working with various businesses across the technological and engineering sector, it will be more than just a space of study but one of interdisciplinary collaboration and a hub for idea-sharing, the formation of partnerships and a fertile ground for Bristol-based tech start-ups.

The building, when completed, will boast co-working spaces, specialist labs, state-of-the-art equipment, skills training, support services and be home to industry events.

Evelyn Welch told me of her ambition for the campus to put Bristol students on a road to becoming “remarkable graduates” and pioneers in the world of tech and engineering. This comes as Bristol was named this month as the best city for start-ups in the UK’s Startup Index, leading in critical metrics such as access to talent, productivity, infrastructure and growth potential.

Vice Chancellor Judith Squires emphasised how the new campus will be an excellent place for students of innovation, engineering, business and other subjects to learn. There will be a Senate House-style living room alongside many other silent and group study spaces.

Perhaps the star of the teaching facilities is an in-the-round lecture theatre (pictured below). This will enable a new age of interactive and exciting teaching, transforming lectures from passive learning experiences to active and inspiring ones.


The building, inspired by the University’s ambition to become a “university for Bristol, not just the university of Bristol”, will showcase local art and has largely been made out of materials from in and around Bristol, for example, metal from Taunton.

It was a pleasure to be invited to tour the site and see first-hand how the University of Bristol is not just preparing for, but pioneering both technological and educational life in the 21st century.