Cardiff Bay studio to double in size with £140m expansion and 1,200 jobs
Four new sound stages on reclaimed dockland will make the Welsh complex the largest outside the London orbit, says the devolved government, which is putting in £31m
A film and television studio complex in Cardiff Bay is to double in size under a £140m expansion that its owners say will create 1,200 permanent jobs and make it the largest production facility in Britain outside the ring of studios around London.
Penarth Road Studios, which opened in 2021 with four stages on a former warehouse site, will add four more of between 25,000 and 40,000 sq ft, a 12-acre backlot and a 300-room crew hotel on reclaimed dockland east of the barrage. The Welsh government is contributing £31m in grants and loans, with the remainder coming from the studio’s majority owner, a Canadian pension fund, and a bank consortium.
The studio’s managing director, Nerys Howells, said the expansion was a response to being “full every week for three years and turning away a series a month”. She said two returning series, including a 10-part drama for a US streamer that has not been announced, had already signed to take the first two new stages when they open in 2028.
“The argument for Wales was always cost and crew,” Howells said. “What has changed is that the crew base here is now deep enough that a production does not have to bring 200 people down the M4. Last year 71% of the people working on our stages lived within 40 miles.”
The figures have been contested by some in the industry. Owain Pritchard, a Cardiff-based production accountant and a member of the Welsh film and television trade body, said the 1,200 figure counted freelance roles that were only guaranteed while stages were occupied. “A studio is a car park with a roof until someone books it,” he said. “The real test is what happens when the streamers cut back again, as they did in 2023, and we have 8 stages instead of 4 sitting empty.”
The economy minister in the Welsh government said the studio sector in Wales had grown from an estimated £100m a year in 2015 to more than £550m last year, and that the expansion was “exactly the sort of investment that keeps young people in south Wales rather than sending them to Ealing”. Planning permission was granted by Cardiff council in July, with conditions on noise and a requirement to restore a stretch of foreshore for wading birds.
Construction is due to begin in January. The first new stage is scheduled to be handed over in March 2028.
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