A fight for the heart of East London: Will there be a data centre on Brick Lane?

Local residents and businesses call for social housing to be built on the site of the development, the Truman Brewery — Sehrish Alikhan reports.

Brick Lane is known for its colourful vintage stops, South Asian delicacies, graffitied walls, and its embrace of the multicultural. At its centre sits the Truman Brewery, once one of the largest breweries in London, and now used for events and housing markets and shops.

In the planning application, Zeloof LLP and Truman Estates proposed to transform the site into office blocks, commercial units, and a data centre.

In 2025, Tower Hamlets Council rejected the development and held a public inquiry. Shortly after, Housing Secretary Steve Reed stepped in to make the final decision, which will be announced by 17 August.

Lutfur Rahman, Executive Mayor of Tower Hamlets, said that the intervention from central government was "highly unusual” and “unprecedented”, as the application was called in while the public inquiry was ongoing.  

The Save Brick Lane campaign has been debating with the Truman Brewery owners on how the land should be used since 2020. Once news of a data centre went public, media exposure skyrocketed.

“It's got people thinking,” said Puru Miah, Save Brick Lane campaigner and former Mile End councillor. “So, before it was just nebulous; we don't want commercial, we want housing. And now you've kind of, like, people can picture what that commercial development is, which is a data centre, and again it just doesn't make sense. Inner-city London — what's the best use of that land? You can put a data centre anywhere.’

Miah highlighted that the campaign is using the newfound publicity “to break that vicious cycle by getting much needed houses and to get that increased footfall into the area to save the independent businesses that make Brick Lane unique”.

He said: “The main issue is that we just need housing, we have a crisis. Not just in Tower Hamlets, but in London, and it's getting worse.”

Rahman and Councillor Faysal Ahmed, Tower Hamlets Cabinet member, continued that building a data centre in a borough where there are 31,000 people on the housing waiting list and 5,500 children in temporary accommodation would be a “scandal”.

According from 2024 data from Shelter England, there are currently 336,366 London households that should be in social housing.

“London has the highest poverty rates in the UK, which is sort of like counterfactual. You don't, you wouldn't assume it, and the largest contributor to that is housing poverty,” Miah said.

Why Brick Lane?

“It’s called energy gentrification,” said a spokesperson from Pull the Plug, a UK grassroots campaign focused on addressing risks arising from AI.

“There is a financial district in Liverpool Street largely, they need that latency, so the data centre actually needs to be as close as possible to that. Hence, why they're building in that community, and that's going to happen more often.”

The 5,200 square foot data centre will cost £500 million to build. According to Pull the Plug, a small-to-medium data centre annually uses as much electricity as 1,000 homes and requires 25.5 million litres of water.

This is not an AI data centre, but will power high-frequency financial trading.

Brick Lane is a hub for ethnic minority communities, largely Bengalis and Bangladeshis who migrated to the UK in the 70s. Before that, it was a working-class area for those looking to break into the big city.

“Now, the opposite is happening,” said Saif Osmani, co-founder of East End Bengali Heritage Society. “The city is actually swallowing Brick Lane because it realised that nobody past the weekend wants to go to the financial centre, and it's largely empty.”

Osmani added that data centres do not “give back” as they promise.

Mads Churchhouse, a Green Party councillor for Bow East, stated that in the proposed plans, majority of the development will consist of offices, and of the 44 flats being built, 35% will be affordable by habitable bedroom. This adds up to less than 15 affordable homes, deemed ‘affordable’ by local property markets, not by wages or living standards.

The plans also promised to generate jobs, which, Osmani said, are mostly being outsourced to remote positions.

Rahman added that the development would “do nothing to contribute to the activity, vitality and character” of Brick Lane.

He said: "This development risks driving up costs, pushing residents out of their community, and undermining the future of the world-famous markets, curry houses and beigel shops that make Brick Lane such a unique and treasured part of London and tourist attraction.”

Climate concerns for locals

Churchhouse expressed concerns that the land is being used to benefit “massive banking corporations” over the needs of local residents.

She said the water usage alone is “grotesque” amid rising temperatures nationwide.

“This week and the last few weeks, we've had these horrific heatwaves in which the centre of London has become almost unbearable to live in, and we have families who cannot cool their homes. We're living in a climate crisis. Preservation of water reserves is actually utterly vital to the survival of residents in this city.”

The final decision

As Prime Minister Keir Starmer stepped down last month and there may be a cabinet shake-up by his successor, it is unclear whether 17 August will remain a hard deadline for a decision.  

Miah said the “incoming Prime Minister Andy Burnham has made housing as part of his key policy lever,” which bodes well for the campaign. However, if the decision does not go their way, they will appeal for a judicial review.

In the meantime, Save Brick Lane is continuing to campaign against the development and are gathering signatures for a petition that will be presented to Tower Hamlets on 22 July.

Zeloof LLP and Truman Estates did not respond to a request for comment.