Britain's Best-Kept Tech Secret
The UK makes some of the best photonics technology in the world. Most people have never heard of it.
A company in Glasgow has been making precision optical periscopes since 1917. That capability is still in Glasgow today, now part of Thales UK, producing advanced optronic systems for submarines. That's not a one-off, it's a pattern across an entire UK industry that quietly underpins far more of daily life than its size would suggest.
The numbers
UK photonics generated £18.5 billion in 2024, and has the potential to reach £50 billion by 2035. It already employs more people than either UK automotive or aerospace manufacturing, and government advisers estimate that over 60% of the UK economy could directly depend on photonics to remain competitive by that same year. AI infrastructure, autonomous vehicles, medical diagnostics- all resting on optical systems most people never think about.
Where it shows up
Photonics is the invisible layer behind an enormous range of technology: the fibre carrying internet traffic, the interconnects wiring together AI data centre GPUs, the sensors and optical systems inside smartphones, and increasingly, the physical links connecting different parts of quantum systems. Defence has supported parts of this capability for decades, alongside communications, healthcare and industrial applications.
The honest gap
Every industry voice at a recent UK photonics gathering said some version of the same thing: the UK is excellent at research, and weaker at turning that research into scaled commercial products. The research base is genuinely strong, spread across more than 40 UK universities and closely connected to industry. But the pipeline from lab to scaled business remains one of the industry's biggest unresolved challenges, alongside a skills base that's been quietly shrinking for years.
Why this matters for talent
This is exactly the gap I think about constantly at iForce Connect. Brilliant research doesn't become a resilient industry without the people who can commercialise it, engineers who understand both the physics and the business case, and organisations willing to build structured pathways rather than hoping talent finds its own way in. The national photonics roadmap now being developed with government is a real chance to close that gap deliberately rather than leaving it to chance.
The UK has been quietly world-class at this for over a hundred years. Maybe it's time that stopped being quiet.
Sources: Photonics Leadership Group, "UK Photonics Landscape 2025"; Council for Science and Technology, advice to the Prime Minister (2026); UK Microelectronics conference panel discussion (2026).