Dear reader — Recently our boss, Mill Media head honcho Joshi Herrmann, claimed that Londoners are more obsessed with the weather than any other peoples in the British Isles.
Though we tried to think of a riposte, we also wondered if he might just be correct. Maybe it’s due to our commutes, which tend to be long and reliant on public transport affected by heavy rain. Maybe it’s our sense of entitlement from long having had more clement conditions than the rest of the country. And, if we’re being soppy, maybe it’s simply because London on a perfect, 25-degrees-and-sunny day is the best place in the world.
Regardless, this might be the craziest June weather in living memory. Because while today it’s flash flooding and 16 degrees, this weekend it’s going to soar to a sweltering 30 degrees. Let us know how it’s affected you — and whether we’d be better purchasing stocks in air conditioning units or flood defence mechanisms — down in the comments below.
To cheer you up on this extremely damp Monday, our briefing today is full of must-know news about the capital, including protests against a planned data centre in the old Truman Brewery in Brick Lane, the strange response we received from a new Green councillor in Waltham Forest concerning our Joan and Tracey Turnell reporting and all-out war at Goldsmiths university. Happy reading (and stay dry out there)!
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Will Brick Lane’s old brewery become a data centre?
Last Thursday, the global SXSW festival was in full swing on Brick Lane, as tech titans came together to discuss the world’s biggest issues in the old Truman Brewery building on Brick Lane.
But just a few hundred metres away, a rebellion against the dogma of big tech was taking place, as dozens of locals and anti-gentrification campaigners came together to picket the festival in response to plans to turn the historic brewery into a data centre.
The data centre plans are part of a planned £500m redevelopment of the historic Brick Lane, which will also include high-end offices. Critics say the proposals will strip the soul away from an area famous for its Bengali-owned small businesses, vintage stores, galleries and, increasingly, viral food haunts.
The old brewery building is owned by Jason and Oren Zeelof, sons of its original owner Ely Zeloof, a Baghdad-born East End garment magnate. They told a planning inquiry that the data centre would “house servers which facilitate data transactions for major companies in the City and City-fringe areas”, according to local news site The Slice, and that “physical proximity” to the City itself “is important as this enables faster electronic transactions to be made”.
Critics instead want affordable housing to be built on the site, to help alleviate the cost of living in Tower Hamlets, one of the most deprived boroughs in the country and maintain the culture and soul of the area.
What’s going to happen? Well the planning decision was “called in” by Housing Secretary Steve Reed in October 2025, meaning it will now be up to him as to if the data centre plans get approval.
When, exactly, that will happen is another matter entirely: the full reports from planning inspectors have been submitted to the Reed already, but often they can go months or years before being acted on by Westminster. And with protests against water and energy hungry data centres spreading across the US, it’s sure to be an increasingly hot-button issue. For now, the future of Brick Lane is still up in the air.
A ‘conflict of interest’...
In the aftermath of our long read on the tragic and anger-inducing death of Tracey Turnell the week before last, we have been inundated with messages from MPs, funeral practitioners, museums, documentarians and everyday readers.
One particular exchange was with Martin Edobor, the new Waltham Forest councillor for St James (elected as part of the Green wave that saw the party take control of the council back in May). In the aftermath, Edobor was made the new cabinet member in charge of adult social care. Shocked about the case, he said he was open to meeting to discuss what could be done. Unassociated with the last Labour administration — who had made no effort to properly engage before, during or after our reporting — it seemed like there may be a chance for Waltham Forest to address their failings in Tracey’s case.
But while we were in the midst of organising timings to meet, an email came from Edobor. He told me he had consulted with the social care department and had been informed that, actually, a meeting would be impossible. Discussing how the department he now runs could prevent a case like Tracey’s from happening again, he claimed, “would be a potential conflict of interest”, as it “relates to council service delivery and my responsibilities as lead member for Adults and Health”.
When we emailed Edobor back to point out that it’s hardly a conflict of interest to meet with stakeholders about council failures, we received no response.
The battle for London’s most free-spirited university
Over the last few years, we’ve covered the increasingly chaotic mess that is Goldsmiths, the bohemian arts-centred south London university once home to the likes of Damien Hirst, Mark Fisher, Bernardine Evaristo and Damon Albarn. But now, things are really starting to kick off.
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