The people v the datacentre? The fight for Brick Lane

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:08Today, on the ground in Brick Lane as a local community fights to stop a data centre.

0:20Just before we start, just a warning that there is a racist insult included in this episode.

0:32If you were making a list of the most iconic streets in London, Brick Lane would definitely be on it. Someone who knows Brick Lane very well is Majida Chowdhury, a young journalist and former Guardian intern who grew up here. Hey, hey, Majida. Hello, I'm Annie. Hi, Annie. Nice to meet you. How are you doing? I'm good. And you're Elena, OK. And on yet another boiling hot August day, She's offered to show Today in Focus producer Eleanor and I around. Right in the heart of the East End, it's loud, it's busy. It's a place where fabric shops and curry houses sit side by side with vintage pop-ups and cocktail bars.

1:13And it's famously one of London's most multicultural and diverse neighbourhoods. Majida was born in Brick Lane and lived here with her mum, siblings and extended family until she was 11. part of the British Bangladeshi community who've lived here since the 1950s. It was a very tiny community. You couldn't walk out the house without recognising someone that you know. And she loved it. So you'd walk through and you could smell the smell of curry, essentially. And then you would also hear people being like, oh, come to my shop, come, come eat here, come eat here. You'd hear that a lot. And it was a very loud place.

1:50I don't think it was ever quiet. up. It sounds like a really happy place to grow up then. Oh yeah, for me definitely. But even back then, 10 years or so ago, this all felt fragile. Even when I was living here, I think opposite my house, there was a massive banner that said, save Brick Lane or stop Brick Lane gentrification. And this was back in like 2015, 2016. And you know, it's always been a battle for the local people to kind of preserve what's here. To people like Majida, preserving what is so special about Brick Lane means fighting to stop developers from moving in and pushing local families and local businesses out.

2:32And over the past few years, one building in particular, the Truman Brewery, has become the front line in the tussle for the future of Brick Lane. The Truman Brewery is part of a huge 10-acre site, right bang slap in the middle of Brick Lane with these big red brick arches on either side of the road and a bridge that stretches across the street. If you've ever been to Brick Lane you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. And aside from a run of expensive cafes and bars most of the Truman Brewery site has Lane unused for years. Until now.

3:18Because, against the wishes of both the local community and the local council, the government has just greenlit a huge data centre to be built right in the middle of the site. And there are many here who believe that this development could mean the end of Brick Lane, as they know and love it. It can happen here in Brick Lane where so many people already understand the historical importance of it in terms of the heritage and what it does for a community in the heart of London. It just sets the dangerous precedent. If it can happen here, it can happen anywhere. From The Guardian, I'm Annie Kelly.

3:56Today in Focus, the battle over the future of Brick Lane and why it matters to all of us.

4:08The Afghan restaurant, I don't think that was there when I was here. It smells so nice. Although Majida grew up in Brick Lane, she doesn't get back here all that often. And as she walks us past some of her old haunts, she keeps noticing how much has changed. This is also new. It's still an Indian restaurant, but it's new. I think like a year ago when I was here, this was a dessert place. Loads of the curry houses that used to line the street have gone. Apparently the number has dropped from 80 about 10 years ago to just over 20 now. We go to Taj Stores, a place of her childhood, now relocated from the main street to somewhere small around the corner, run by a guy called Jamal.

4:50Jamal, who, despite the heat, is immaculately turned out in a polo shirt and chinos, is obviously hugely proud of his family business and how long it's been serving the community. Yeah, it's 90 years this year. Wow, that's incredible. Yeah, I'm getting ready for the fourth generation by the end of the year. And we just moved here five weeks ago. It's all because of the whole area is being changed. You know, and obviously the common word which is being used now, which is very true, is gentrification. And that is actually driving a lot of businesses away, unfortunately. And then on top of that, you have all these big boys trying to develop unnecessary things that we don't really need in this area, i.e.

5:35data centre and so forth. So, yeah, it's a shame. I think a data centre is probably going to have only about 10, 12 people, I believe, working in the whole data centre. So it doesn't really generate any new jobs. I mean, what benefit does it do to us as a community, as for local residents, for local small businesses, independent businesses? Jamal says for his community, making Brick Lane what it is today has come at a cost. And now he's worried they're being forced out. It hurts because obviously growing up in Brick Lane wasn't easy. I mean, it wasn't easy being attacked, being spat on, being compacties and, you know, seeing our elders being punched and slapped and whatever.

6:19So, you know what? They went through a lot of things. and, you know, after a lot of hardship, they made it as a home, like a second Bangladesh. There's always changes in the areas, but Brick Lane seems like a rapid change. You know, as we all know, from Huguenots to Jews and Jews to Bangladeshis, and Bangladeshis now to multicultural, and I call them party people, do you know what I mean? So I haven't got nothing against it, but there's no sense of community no more.

6:59One of the reasons that locals like Jamal are so angry about the data centre is because of what could have been built instead. Housing is probably the biggest problem for people here in Tower Hamlets. It's one of the most deprived wards in London, with an overall poverty rate of about 40%. We go to find someone who knows a lot about what this looks like on the ground. I'm Councillor Faisal Ahmed, newly elected Councillor for Spitalfields and Banglatown, which includes the Brick Lane area. And are you a local yourself? Yes, born and raised in Brick Lane. Faisal remembers the Truman Brewery from growing up in Brick Lane.

7:38It's one of those estates where we used to climb in as kids, because it was always derelict. There's nothing happening. And we'd look at this place called Amazing Place. had so much potential. Everyone, I guess, kind of had a hope that one day it would turn into something that's beneficial for the community. The council did not want the data centre in the Truman Brewery to be built. In fact, they said no to the whole development before Angela Rayner, the housing minister, went over their heads to greenlight it. And this seems to be especially disheartening to Faisal and other locals we talked to, that this was one of the first decisions taken by Andy Burnham's government.

8:17One that's made a big deal about localism, housing and giving power back to communities. It's just really disappointing because we have a huge housing issue in London, around the country, especially in Tower Hamlets. We've got 31 ,000 people on the waiting list. That number, 31 ,000 people, can you just explain what's the kind of human story behind those figures? I come across cases every single day where families are literally seven of them cramped into one bedroom flat, people are sleeping on the floor because there's no space in the house. So, you know, 31 ,000, it's 31 ,000 individual cases of hardship, of struggle.

9:00When you look at a development like the Truman Brewery, what do you see the potential for in terms of addressing that problem? So, I mean, the site has huge potential. I mean, the council's planning offices submitted a plan where they say, you know, a conservative kind of estimate, where they can house at least 300 plus homes. So take that data center into the city. We don't need or want it here. Pretty soon, Brick Lane won't be Brick Lane. It would just be a soulless place. You know, we're known as the curry capital of Europe. That won't be the case anymore.

9:46The speed at which the data centre was greenlit seems to have taken everyone by surprise. So we head down Brick Lane to meet the people who are doing everything they can to try and stop it. OK, so we're off to meet Jonathan Mobley, who is the Save Brick Lane campaigner, who basically has been mobilising against this data centre, but also I think has been working for a long time to try and save the Truman Brewery from various other different developments that have been threatened over the years. And he is with Owen Espley, who is from the Global Action Campaign, and his organisation has been looking at the problem of data centres in general from not just a community but also from an environmental perspective.

10:29So they are strategising... Jonathan and Owen are in the Brick Lane coffee shop, and when we arrive, they're out the back in the small garden in the middle of a crisis meeting. Yes, so if I don't know, we'll be doing that. Jonathan has been running the Save Brick Lane campaign for years now. Much of his focus had been on trying to stop a shopping centre being built inside the Truman Brewery. That is until they discovered what else was being planned. We've been campaigning against plans put forward by the Truman Brewery for a long time now, for about five years, five or six years. Let's explain, who owns the Truman Brewery?

11:06That's a really good question. So the site was bought by the Zalouf family in the mid-90s. The Zalouf family are locals as well, but Jonathan tells me that this 10-acre site lay pretty much undeveloped until the family moved their business offshore and their plans for the Truman Brewery and Brick Lane changed. This is all the land, all these bits are the land owned by the Truman Estates. Jonathan gets out this well-worn map of the Truman Brewery and all of the proposed development that's just been approved by the government. We see it's not just a data centre that's going ahead. And we've got office blocks and entertainment venues in here.

11:47There's even going to be a brewery in here somewhere. This is currently the site of the Banglatown Kashin Kari. This is going to be housing, but it's going to be luxury housing. In the whole of this development, both east and west, there's going to be six homes for social rent on here. Six? Six, and we're saying in a development of this scale... How many other apartments in this proposed block? There are 44 altogether. And six will be affordable housing? Yeah. And any other affordable housing in the main? No. After speaking to Faisal about the desperate need for housing in this community, this point really hits home.

12:26We later looked at the plans about the Truman Brewery site on the government housing website. And there are just six houses for people on low incomes. And a further five at what's described as intermediate rents, which still technically count as affordable housing. And of course, also on the site, this data centre for the city, which looms over Brick Lane as we speak. Can you explain what it's going to be used for, the data centre? Yes, so the data center, the reason why it is considered to be appropriate to put a data center there is its proximity to the trading floors, commodity trading in the city.

13:06There's this thing called high frequency trading where if you can get your trade in a split second, a microsecond before the competition, you will make a profit. Now, it's important that distance between you and the trading floor is actually vital because it's about the speed of light. Every inch you're closer to the trading floor, you can get your ordering first. And that is the tenant, the actual clients for the tenant who will occupy the data centre. That's who they are, high frequency traders. Right, so they are effectively using this data centre as basically like a big booster to the speed at which they can make these trades.

13:55And they're not physical people, like, pressing a button really quickly. So it's machines, it's AI, algorithms, getting ahead of each other. It's a race to try and get to those deals the fastest, and that's like a fraction of a second. It's machines competing with other machines to get in there first. Absolutely, people don't come into it at all. I mean, if you look at the employment within the data centre that's being planned here, 5 ,200 square metre block, big metal box with no windows, it's going to employ, the developers themselves claim employment of around 15 people. 15? 15 people. As Jonathan is outlining all of his fears about what the data centre will mean for Brick Lane, across the table, Owen from the Global Action Network is nodding in agreement.

14:42He says the Truman Brewery development is part of a huge data centre building spree that is happening across the country. The UK wants to triple its data centre capacity by 2035, which means it needs a lot of new data centres built quickly. So much so that it has just added data centres to the UK's critical national infrastructure list, joining stuff like emergency services, water and electricity. and this means that the government now has the power to override the normal planning approval processes and directly approve the building of new data centres. OK, so basically if you've got a data centre, the government can tell you that you're fine to go ahead even if everyone locally is opposed to it, including the council.

15:30Yeah, that's right. And what would you say, for instance, to the argument that, OK, well, in this particular case, Truman Brewery data centre, Well, we do need it because we need to be able to get ahead of the competitors. We need our economy to grow and we need those deals to be made and for that economic growth to happen, for the UK to be able to improve living standards and pump more money into the economy. The local people are saying what's going to help our economic development in the East End most is to tackle the housing crisis. How many people's economic opportunities are withdrawn because they're in temporary housing?

16:05How many families are not able to do the work that they need because they're on a housing waiting list. Those are economic questions about what kind of economic development do we want. And what we're seeing here is the government said we're going to bet all the houses on data centres and AI build out and local people aren't able to input that. Owen says Brick Lane isn't the only place where the government is forcing data centres on communities that don't want them. From a Devon town... There's an absolutely enormous data centre and battery pack that's planned, 1.5 gigawatts, almost... absolutely huge almost as big as the entire town itself being built on a to rural scotland in the hunterston castle an ancient castle right next to it is being planned an enormous data to the green belt in havering an enormous data center is planned in a place called north ockenden in potter's bar and another enormous data center local people should have a right to influence and shape the space around them and this data center goes completely against that it's imposed on behalf of some of the richest people on the planet on a very poor community in East London who have been pushed out in the interest and to be used by city traders.

17:18Coming up, we go to the Truman Brewery site to get a glimpse of the future of Brick Lane.

17:41Jonathan and Owen offer to take us to the site to show us exactly where the new data centre is going to be built. This big gate here is one of the entrances to the Truman Brewery grounds. And when we arrive and go under those red brick arches into the Truman estate site, which is huge, much bigger than I remember, We learn that there is actually already a data centre there, a big brick building with only one window right at the back of the site. This is a data centre here. This is the existing one. Ah, so this is a building opposite, which is already a data centre. Yeah, and you can hear it. OK.

18:20Oh, yeah, you can. But you can see the way this street, as soon as you get to that building, is a dead street. There is no reason for anyone to go further than the beginning of where the data centre starts because there's nothing there. And they then show us where the new data centre's going to be built, right beside it. At the moment, it's just an abandoned building with loads of graffiti on it, but it's massive. I count four, five, six storeys up. One of the things with data centres is the economic benefits to situating them next to each other. So one of the big fears people have is once you get one data centre, the rationale for having another one built next door and then another one and another one becomes stronger and stronger.

19:01Because they interoperate. They use the word cluster, and they talk about data centre clusters being beneficial. Owen says that the elephant in the room when it comes to all of this hard and fast data centre development is that we actually don't have the capacity in the UK to run them. And it's, again, local people who are going to end up suffering. The London Assembly's done an investigation into electricity grid in West London and found that housing was standing empty that had been built and couldn't be used because it couldn't get a connection to the electricity grid because the available electricity capacity had been taken by data centres.

19:38But we're also seeing that elsewhere, that the competition between housing for sites and for access to electricity, you know, there's a competition between them for the available electricity to be able to do it. So major new housing developments aren't going ahead because they won't be able to connect to the grid in the future. And that's slowing down housing. It all feels pretty depressing at this point. So I ask Owen if he's opposed to data centres in general, or whether there is a way that they could build data centres that could work sustainably and benefit everyone. And he says yes, but right now we're getting it wrong.

20:15Of course. We want data centres to find a new cure to cancer. We want data centres to make our healthcare more better. We want data centres to be available for scientists. But is having hyperscale data centres using generative AI owned by big American companies the way that we're going to get the benefits from that digitisation of life? Or is much greater community control over them, building them in the right place and thinking about the ownership of that market and who gets the benefit from it and making sure that they're interoperable? People can build data centres in a way which is sustainable, but they're not going to happen unless our leaders listen to the people and say that we've got to make sure they're sustainable.

20:53We've got to make sure there's actually water available, or we're going to end up with droughts and water stress and grid blackouts. So it's about balancing all of those different things and making sure we're doing it properly. We're already not doing what we need to do to meet our climate targets. And so to pile on top of that huge data centres, which require so much energy and so much water, where's the plan to make that work? Rather than the kind of free fall which we're having at the minute, which is everyone who wants to make a quick book puts in a proposal for a data centre and they hope they're going to make themselves rich.

21:29Local campaigners, like Jonathan, say they are not going to stop fighting. However unlikely they are to succeed. And Owen says that other communities across the UK are also waking up and starting to resist too. People are up in arms about what's taking place and the government's going to have to take a decision. Is it going to hold true to its word on localism? Or is it going to listen to those local voices and change tack on this AI data centres? Yeah, you've already seen like huge issue, well, starting to be a real problem in America, isn't it? Data centres in local communities where people are really up in arms.

22:03Do you think that that's kind of the future that we're going to see? It's going to be that as local people versus the data centres? What we're seeing in the US, and they're a couple of years ahead of us in terms of the build out of AI data centres, is those local campaigns are changing local politics. And so elected politicians here should know that that's the future that might be in place for them if they don't start listening to people and have a proper national debate about what do we want for data centres and where do we want them. And that's it for today. We approached the developer for the Treemann Brewery for an interview, but they declined to speak to us.

22:37We also contacted the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government, who didn't offer a comment. Our thanks to everyone who spoke to us in Brick Lane, especially Majida, Jamal, Faisal, Jonathan and Owen. This episode was produced by Elna Biggs and presented by me, Annie Kelly. Sound design was by Bria McNamara. And the executive producers were Homa Khalili and Sammy Kent. And we'll be back later on today with the latest.

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