The data centres stopping new housing in London’s poorest borough

Dear Londoners — policy making in the capital often feels like a series of awful trade-offs; a balancing act of competing interests and budgets. That’s exactly what forms the basis of the big story in today’s edition, which focuses on how the government and private sectors’ rush to build AI data centres is upending London’s power grid and leaving whole districts unable to build new housing. Alongside that, we cover the memorials on the 20th anniversary of the 7/7 bombings, the high price of football hooliganism and the vandalism of a Windrush art project. 

Big story: How a spate of data centres is killing off social housing on the Isle of Dogs

Top Line: The electricity needed by a series of power-hungry data centres on the Isle of Dogs has undermined the council’s plans to build housing in the area for the next decade.

Background: More than 20 data centres now operate on the Isle of Dogs, with the location ideal not just for its proximity to the financial hub of Canary Wharf, but for its access to an endless supply of water from the area’s network of former docks used as coolant. But, as London Spy reports, Tower Hamlets council recently admitted that there was a “severe” risk that “house building, at scale, is unable to proceed for potentially 10+ years due to lack of available electricity capacity” as a result of those data centres chewing up too much power. In 2023, a study by the council found as much as 75% of all electricity demand in the area was coming from data centres, versus 16% for offices and 6% for homes.

Why more housing in the Docklands is so important: Tower Hamlets is London’s poorest borough and, at 40%, has the highest child poverty rate in the entire country. A large reason for that is the lack of affordable and decent housing in the area. But local policy making is often forced to choose between serving the interests of the people of the borough and those of the businesses located in Canary Wharf, the UK’s main financial hub.  

The future: Tower Hamlets has raised the alarm about the issue with City Hall and London’s electricity distributor in an attempt to increase the power supply to the area. It is also planning to crack down on new data centres with “robust” changes to its planning policies, including caps on power usage. 

A city-wide problem: In 2022, there was a similar problem in West London, with City Hall warning developers that a growth in data centres along the M4 corridor meant the local grid was at capacity, potentially halting any new house building for over a decade. 

What the council said: When approached by London Spy, the council told a different story than the one playing out in their own risk registers, research and planning documents. They claimed they were “not aware of a lack of grid capacity on the Isle of Dogs” and that they “support the delivery of much-needed housing” in the area. 

Your news briefing

📰 Today marks the 20th anniversary of the 7/7 bombings that killed 52 people and left hundreds more injured. The press is covered in memorials and pieces recounting the events, but we feel these stories in The Times and the Guardian focusing on the families of those killed that day are worth spending time with today.

🚨 A 24-year-old man has been arrested after vandalising the Windrush Untold Stories exhibition in Brixton. The outdoor exhibition uses portraits and personal stories to honour the legacy of the Windrush generation and their impact, but was damaged in the early hours of Thursday morning. The attack was initially suspected to be a targeted “act of racial hatred” but since the arrest police have said it was not being treated as a hate crime, reports Brixton Buzz.

⚽ Met chief Mark Rowley has called on football clubs to pay towards the £70m annual cost of policing their matches in the UK — a thought we raised a couple of months ago in a feature on the police officers that track hooligans. Currently, less than £15m of that £70m is paid for by clubs, despite Premier League teams happily spending £400m in a single transfer window. Angered clubs, however, have claimed forcing them to do so would mean they would have to increase ticket prices. 

🎾 As the balls fly back and forth on Centre Court, the courts are gearing up to rule on a judicial review over Wimbledon’s decision to expand its site with a further 39 courts. Local campaigners have challenged the decision to grant planning permission for the development on the site of the old Wimbledon Park golf club, which will include an 8,000-seat show court.

Got a story for us to look into? Please get in touch.

If you missed it

Last week’s stories:

• On Saturday, we covered a beaver re-wilding scheme in Ealing that’s hoping to be a pilot project for the wholesale return of the furry river dwellers to the capital — 400 years after they were first hunted to extinction.   
• On Friday, we investigated viral social media claims that Brockwell Lido got so busy during the heatwave that the police were called out to evict bemused swimmers.
• On Thursday, we revealed the details of since shelved plans to introduce a zero emissions zone in central London that could have seen the banning of all “diesel private cars” and “non-diesel private cars” from a slice of Central London stretching from Elephant & Castle to Regent’s Park.
• On Tuesday, as the heatwave continued to turn Londoners into puddles of sweat, we explored the heat islands that have left certain spots of the capital up to 7 degrees hotter than their neighbours, and the councils frantically trying to stop it.

Pub of the week

Complete with a list of strict rules set by legendary publican Kevin Moran, the Nag's Head in Belgravia is an oasis for those who hate seeing everybody in the pub on their phones — as well as a true, eccentric delight.

West End Vice — Alan Hollinghurst, London Review of Books

“Alan Hollinghurst on queer London” — those words alone should be enough to sell you on this review of two volumes about the capital’s queer scene in the mid-twentieth century, but, if not, then know it contains this sentence: “Some Men in London is rare among really good anthologies in containing a huge amount of rubbish.” The result is a typically great essay from one of the UK’s most celebrated writers — by turns funny, lyrical and acerbic.

The real Salt Path: how a blockbuster book and film were spun from lies, deceit and desperation — Chloe Hadjimatheou, Observer

Although this piece isn’t about the capital, we felt it was only right to point Londoner readers in the direction of this masterful Observer piece (particularly since we delight in exposés of untruths in bestselling books). In it, reporter Chloe Hadjimatheou masterfully unwinds how the supposedly true story of financial hardship and terminal illness that underpins the bestselling book and critically-acclaimed movie The Salt Path may have been fabricated.

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To Do List

1. There’s something about watching the darts; an itch that no other sport can scratch. But given a trip to watch the Worlds Darts Championship at the Ally Pally will set you back hundreds of pounds, how about instead heading to Hyde Park tomorrow to watch the darts championship. Part of the BST events, you can catch Luke Littler, Luke Humphries and Michael Van Gerwen in action for £30.
2. There’s a spate of unique showings down at the Prince Charles cinema this week, including the first series of Twin Peaks, the 25th anniversary edition of Wong Kar Wai’s In The Mood For Love and a mystery movie on Tuesday. Maybe most enticing, though, is the chance to see a Godzilla vs Megalon, a terrible 1970s Japanese monster movie.

From the archive