Andy Burnham’s Labour government has overridden Tower Hamlets council and thousands of local objections to force through a power-hungry data centre near Brick Lane, even as London suffers its worst drought in decades.
Housing secretary Angela Rayner approved the development at the Truman Brewery last week, overturning the council’s July 2025 rejection. The 5,200-square-metre data centre on Grey Eagle Street was proposed by Truman Estates and Zeloof LLP.
The Aspire-led council had rejected the project following widespread opposition. Thousands signed a petition against it. In October 2025, then-housing secretary Steve Reed took the decision out of the council’s hands, allowing central government to impose the final outcome.
The episode shows how bourgeois democracy works in practice. Residents were free to object, campaign and elect councillors, but they had no control once their decision obstructed a development backed by property and finance capital. The central state simply removed the choice from them. The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie usually appears in precisely this mundane form: ministerial orders and planning powers that ensure the interests of capital ultimately prevail.
According to the Save Brick Lane campaign, the data centre will draw up to 5.2MW of power — as much as around 15,000 homes. One of the site’s main commercial advantages is its proximity to the City, allowing high-frequency traders to cut milliseconds from their transactions.
Computing infrastructure is necessary to any modern economy. The question is which class controls it and what purposes it serves. Under capitalism, investment isn’t directed towards meeting social needs. It follows profit. Here, enormous amounts of electricity, land and infrastructure are being devoted partly to helping financiers compete over who can buy and sell assets a fraction of a second faster.
The City is one of the main command centres of British finance capital and imperialism. Its institutions move and appropriate wealth produced across the world. High-frequency trading produces nothing of social value. It’s an arms race within the financial sector over who can capture value first, with an East London community expected to provide the land, electricity and cooling capacity required to make that race run faster.
No projection for the centre’s water consumption has been released. Data centres commonly use huge quantities of water to prevent their servers from overheating. Even with cooling systems, the heat they emit can raise surrounding temperatures. Their demands on the electricity grid can also require expensive infrastructure upgrades, with the cost passed on to households through higher bills.
Labour minister Matthew Pennycook said the project would proceed following “an assessment of potential impacts… on groundwater levels”. The government has therefore decided that an unpublished assessment is sufficient to dismiss the concerns of the people who will live with the development.
The developers have wrapped the data centre in a larger scheme containing offices, a cinema, a supermarket and 44 homes. Just six of those homes will be available for social rent.
Save Brick Lane said the scheme “offers almost nothing to local stakeholders and the community” and contains “only a tiny amount of social and affordable housing”.
“This development will threaten the livelihood of existing independent shops and businesses in Brick Lane,” the campaign added.
The six social-rent homes serve as a thin social covering for a development organised around the interests of developers and the City. Workers and existing traders will bear the pressure on local infrastructure and the disruption to the neighbourhood. Property owners and financial firms will collect the gains.
This isn’t an isolated project. Around 100 data centres are currently planned across Britain, according to researchers at Barbour ABI. Their vast demands for electricity and water are helping to deepen the environmental crisis created by capitalist production.
London, together with roughly half of England, is already experiencing its worst drought in decades. July became the first month since records began in which the Kew Gardens weather station registered no rainfall.
Labour’s decision lays out the priorities of capitalist government with unusual clarity. While millions face water shortages, rising bills and a chronic shortage of decent housing, finance capital gets another piece of energy-intensive infrastructure. The speed at which money changes hands in the City counts for more than the resources, livelihoods and expressed wishes of the people living in Brick Lane.
