Lilly Research Centre
medical Research Centre in Surrey
The Lilly Research Centre is a medical research centre in Surrey. It is the European headquarters of Eli Lilly and Company.
Construction
Lilly received permission for the site in 1959. The site was built by McAlpine.
The site was to open by August 1967, being 47 acres
From 1967 the catering was provided by the Bateman Catering Organisation
History
The former research site of Lilly was at Bromborough.
In 1968, when the centre opened, Eli Lilly was spending £20m on research in the UK. The average research cost of a new molecular entity is currently over £1bn. In 2003, a £40m investment transformed the site into a Centre of Excellence in Neuroscience Research.
Director of Research at the centre was Bill Dawson, a Fellow of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain.
In October 2019, Eli Lilly announced the closure of their Erl Wood research centre by the end of 2020 with some staff moving to other Eli Lilly locations in the local area and neuroscience research moving to the USA. A year later, in October 2020, UCB announced they had acquired the site from Lilly and would complete a refurbishment of the site.
Visits
It was featured in a two-part Panorama documentary on 10 and 17 January 1983, presented by Tom Mangold.
The public source identifies “Lilly Research Centre” as medical Research Centre in Surrey. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Lilly, Research and Centre.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q60786256. Authority coordinates are 51.376, -0.678. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1959, 1967, 1968 and 2003.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lilly Research Centre” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.