A television network majority-owned by David Montgomery, the media entrepreneur, is to snap up the licence to operate a London-focused TV station from Lord Lebedev, owner of the capital’s weekly Standard newspaper.

Sky News has learnt that Local TV Ltd, which was acquired by Mr Montgomery in 2017, is close to announcing a deal to buy the London licence from London Live.

Lord Lebedev was said last month to be exploring a sale of the London Live station he launched in 2014, with The Sunday Times reporting that it had lost more than £20m since it was established.

One media industry source said the deal would take Local TV’s share of the locally broadcast television market to roughly 60%.

It already has channels focused on locations including Birmingham, Leeds and Cardiff.

The company’s eight existing channels are broadcast to more than five million UK households.

While owned by Mr Montgomery, Local TV is run by Lesley Mackenzie, its chief executive.

Mr Montgomery, the former Mirror Group Newspapers executive, has also been involved in the auction of The Daily Telegraph, having tabled an offer for the right-leaning newspaper last year.

He was reported this weekend to have met Todd Boehly, the Chelsea Football Club co-owner, about collaborating on a bid.

Tim Kirkman, the London Live managing director, declined to comment when reached by Sky News on Sunday afternoon, while Local TV could not be reached for comment.

Outside it is the bleak midwinter. We are smack bang in the middle of some of the country’s best agricultural land.

But inside the cavernous warehouse where we’ve come, you wouldn’t have a clue about any of that: there is no daylight; it feels like it could be any time of the day, any season of the year.

We are at Fischer Farms – Europe’s biggest vertical farm.

The whole point of a vertical farm is to create an environment where you can grow plants, stacked on top of each other (hence: vertical) in high density. The idea being that you can grow your salads or peas somewhere close to the cities where they’re consumed rather than hundreds of miles away. Location is not supposed to matter.

So the fact that this particular one is to be found amid the fields a few miles outside Norwich is somewhat irrelevant. It could be anywhere. Indeed, unlike most farms, which are sometimes named after the family that owns them or a local landmark, this one is simply called “Farm 2”. “Farm 1” is to be found in Staffordshire, in case you were wondering.

Farm boss’s dizzying ambition

These futuristic farm units are the brainwave of Tristan Fischer, a serial entrepreneur who has spent much of his career working on renewable energy in its various guises. His ambition now is dizzying: to be able to grow not just basil and chives in a farm like this but to grow other, trickier and more competitive crops too – from strawberries to wheat and rice.

Only then, he says, can vertical farming stand a chance of truly changing the world.

The idea behind vertical farming itself is more than a century old. Back in 1915, American geologist Gilbert Ellis Bailey described how it could be done in theory. In theory, one should be able to grow plants hydroponically – in other words with a mineral substrate instead of soil – in a controlled environment and thereby increase the yield dramatically.

In one sense this is what’s already being done in greenhouses across much of Northern Europe and the US, where tomatoes and other warm-weather-loving vegetables are grown in temperature-controlled environments. However, while most of these greenhouses still depend on natural light (if sometimes bolstered by electric bulbs) the point behind vertical farming was that by controlling the amount of light, one could grow more or less everything, any time of the year. And by stacking the crops together one could yield even more crops in each acre of land one was using.

Look at a long-term chart of agricultural yields in this country and you start to see why this might matter. The quantity of crops we grow in each acre of land jumped dramatically in the second half of the 20th century – a consequence in part of liberal use of artificial fertiliser and in part of new technologies and systems. But that productivity rate started to tail off towards the end of the century.

‘Changing the equation’

Vertical farming promises, if it can make the numbers add up, to change the equation, dramatically increasing agricultural productivity in the coming decades. The question is whether the technology is there yet.

And when it comes to the technology, one thing has certainly changed. Those early vertical farms (the first attempts actually date back to the 1950s) all had a big problem: the bulbs. Incandescent bulbs were both too hot and too energy intensive to work in these environments. But the latest generation of LED bulbs are both cool and cheap, and it’s these bulbs you need (in vast numbers) if you’re going to make vertical farming work.

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Here at Farm 2, you encounter row after row of trays, each stacked on top of each other, each carrying increasingly leafy basil plants. They sit under thousands of little LED bulbs which are tuned to precisely the right spectral frequency to encourage the plant to grow rapidly.

Mr Fischer says: “We’re on this downward cost curve on LEDs. And then when you think about other main inputs, energy – renewable energy – is constantly coming down as well.

“So you think about all the big drivers of vertical farming, they’re going down, whereas compared to full-grown crops, everything’s going up – the fertilisers, rents, water is becoming more expensive too.”

This farm – which currently sells to restaurant chains rather than direct to consumers – is now cost-competitive with the basil shipped (or more often flown) in from the Mediterranean and North Africa. The carbon footprint is considerably lower too.

“And our long-term goal is that we can get a lot cheaper,” says Mr Fischer. “If you look at Farm 1, we spent about £2.5m on lights in 2018. Fast forward to Farm 2; it’s seven and a half times bigger and in those three years the lights were effectively half the price. We’re also probably using 60 to 70 percent less power.”

It might seem odd to hear a farmer talk so much about energy and comparatively less about the kinds of things one associates with farmers – the soil or tractors or the weather – but vertical farming is in large part an energy business. If energy prices are low enough, it makes the crops here considerably cheaper.

But here in the UK, with power costs higher than anywhere else in the developed world, the prospects for this business are more challenged than elsewhere. Still, Mr Fischer’s objective is to prove the business case here before building bigger units elsewhere, in countries with much cheaper power.

In much the same way as Dutch growers came to dominate those greenhouses, he thinks the UK has a chance of dominating this new agricultural sector.

The owners of Shawbrook Group, the mid-sized British lender, are drawing up plans to kickstart London’s moribund listings arena with a stock market flotation, valuing it at more than £2bn.

Sky News has learnt that BC Partners and Pollen Street Capital, which took Shawbrook private in 2017, are close to appointing Goldman Sachs to oversee work on a potential initial public offering.

Other investment banks, possibly including Barclays, are expected to be added in the near future.

Shawbrook’s shareholders are said to be keen to take the company public during the first half of this year.

People close to the situation cautioned that no decision to proceed with a listing had been taken, and that it would be dependent upon market conditions.

If it does go ahead, Shawbrook would almost certainly rank among the largest companies to list in London during the first half of 2025.

Bankers and investors are also waiting to see whether British regulators give the green light to a flotation for Shein, the Chinese-founded online fashion giant, which would be one of the City’s biggest-ever floats if it takes place.

Overall, London is fighting to overturn the impression that its public markets have become a troubled arena for public companies, afflicted by a lack of liquidity and weaker valuations than they might attract in the US.

In recent months, that perception has intensified with the decision of Ashtead, the FTSE-100 equipment rental company, to move its primary listing to New York.

Shawbrook, which employs close to 1,600 people, has 550,000 customers.

Founded in 2011, it was established as a specialist savings and lending institution, providing loans for home improvement projects and weddings, as well as business and real estate lending.

It is among a crop of mid-tier lenders, including OneSavings Bank, Aldermore Bank and Paragon Bank, which have collectively become a significant part of Britain’s banking landscape since the last financial crisis.

The bid to take Shawbrook public this year will come a year after its owners were reported to have hired Bank of America and Morgan Stanley to explore a sale or listing.

It explored a similar process in 2022 but abandoned it amid volatile market conditions.

The company has also sought to position itself at the heart of potential consolidation among the sector’s leading players.

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In the autumn of 2023, Shawbrook approached Metro Bank about a possible takeover as the latter bank battled to stay afloat.

A series of proposals was rejected by Metro Bank’s board.

Just weeks earlier, Shawbrook sounded out the Co-operative Bank about a £3.5bn all-share merger in an attempt to pre-empt a wider auction of the former mutually owned lender.

That, too, was rebuffed, with the Co-operative Bank completing its sale to the Coventry Building Society this week.

Third-quarter results for Shawbrook released to bondholders in November disclosed 18% growth in its loan book on an annualised basis to just over £15bn.

BC Partners and Pollen Street own equal stakes in Shawbrook, with its management team also owning a minority.

The bank is run by chief executive Marcelino Castrillo.

“We continue to see promising opportunities for expansion and value creation across our core markets, including SME and real estate,” Mr Castrillo said in November.

“The combination of an exceptional customer franchise, a more stable macroeconomic outlook and increasing customer confidence means we are well-positioned to continue to deliver on our strategic ambitions throughout the remainder of 2024 and beyond.”

This weekend, Shawbrook, BC Partners and Pollen Street all declined to comment.