The first companies renting space within Taunton’s new £11m innovation centre are expected to move in “within weeks”, Somerset Council has claimed.

Somerset County Council begin building the Firepool Centre for Digital Innovation (FCDI) in November 2021, having secured planning permission for the Taunton facility in February the same year.

Work has been slowly but steadily progressing since then on the facility (formerly known as the Somerset Digital Innovation Centre), which will provide a base to small and medium-sized businesses within the digital sector.

Somerset Council (which inherited the project in April 2023) has been organising tours of the premises, which has already hosted a small number of conferences and other events since construction was completed.

The council has said it hoped to have the first permanent tenants moving in before the summer, as work begins to ramp up on the wider Firepool regeneration site.

The new facility includes four floors of flexible office space, along with event spaces, co-working hubs, a reception area and a café.

The building benefits from ultrafast broadband, allowing for high-resolution video conferencing, and also includes a dedicated audio-visual podcast room.

Councillor Ros Wyke, portfolio holder for economic development, planning and assets, explained the benefits of the building to the Local Democracy Reporting Service during an exclusive tour on Thursday afternoon (April 25).

The centre is intended to serve as a complementary facility to the iAero centre in Yeovil and the Somerset Energy Innovation Centre in Bridgwater, which provide a focal point of support for Somerset’s aerospace and nuclear industries respectively.

Ms Wyke defended the level of council spending on the project, stating that providing these kinds of facilities were essential to attracting businesses away from London and the Home Counties.

The innovation centre lies at the northern end of the Firepool regeneration centre, which has been vacant since Taunton’s cattle market closed in 2008.

Somerset West and Taunton Council secured planning permission to regenerate numerous elements of the site before its abolition, including the delivery of the access road from the A3087 Trenchard Way, the conversion of the former GWR goods office into commercial space, the delivery of a new permanent boulevard through the site, and raising the entire area to prevent future flooding.

The raising of the site has already been completed, with Somerset Council due to begin work on the boulevard later in the spring – which Ms Wyke said would lay the ground for the future residential and commercial redevelopment of the site.

She said: “What we’ve managed to do is to find funding to make the site a lot more ready for development.

“Things have been sorted out in terms of the roads and the utilities, and there is a development plan for the area which has been consulted upon twice.

“The next step is to put in the more formal link from the railway station all the way to Vivary Park.”

To express an interest in space within the Firepool centre, or for more information, visit www.somerset.gov.uk/business-economy-and-licences/somerset-innovation-centres.