TL;DR

Greenwich Council has come out against a proposed data centre at Charlton Riverside in south-east London before its backers have even lodged a planning application, the BBC reported on Sunday 4 October. The scheme, about a million square feet (100,000 sq m) of floorspace, would sit on industrial land the council wants for homes, transport and jobs. Charlton Gateway, the group behind it, says it would help unlock housing rather than block it.

The council’s case

Tom Creswell, who holds Greenwich’s planning brief in the cabinet, said the council intends to deliver roughly 8,000 homes and 1,000 jobs around Charlton Riverside, alongside better public transport. A replacement local plan is still being drafted, and for now it describes the land only as earmarked for a mix of housing, commercial and light industrial use. The borough’s 2014 plan, which runs to 2028, already named Charlton Riverside a “key regeneration area”.

Residents quoted in the BBC’s report raised generator noise, energy demand and the shortage of places to live.

The developer’s case

A spokesperson for the scheme said regeneration there had made “limited” progress, and noted that data centres now count as Critical National Infrastructure under a government designation. They argued that new roads and green space would make nearby homes more viable. Charlton Gateway also says the site is not intended for AI, that cooling would run on a closed water loop, and that its generators are for backup and would only be tested now and then.

A government spokesperson rejected as false the claim that data centres are “draining the country’s water”, putting their share of non-household water use in England at 0.2%. It added that this “does not mean a blank cheque for Big Tech” and that schemes must go through planning.

A familiar London argument

Charlton is not the first east or south London site to set data centres against housing. The BBC notes that a controversial Brick Lane facility in Tower Hamlets won approval in July. Campaigners there had argued it would worsen the area’s housing crisis, the Guardian reported at the time. Outside London, villagers near Lymm in Cheshire are organising against a campus that has not yet reached planning either.

Mark Pestridge, managing director at Telehouse, which runs a Tower Hamlets site dating from 1989, said demand is rising fast because of London’s role in finance and technology, and that the industry has done a poor job of explaining its electricity and water use.

Looking forward

Greenwich’s draft local plan, which has yet to name a specific use for the land, is the next marker to watch. In our view, the Critical National Infrastructure designation hands developers a national-interest argument to set against local housing plans, and UK councils drafting plans now should expect to hear it.