Last year, London Society members went behind the scenes at the Truman Brewery to explore the regeneration of one of East London’s most distinctive historic sites. Today, proposals for a data centre there have placed Brick Lane at the centre of a much bigger debate about the physical infrastructure required by our digital lives, and how London finds the land and power to accommodate it.
In May 2025, The London Society visited the Truman Brewery, where we heard from developer Growing Places about its ambitions and passion for the regeneration of this extraordinary historic site.
Our interest in the future of Brick Lane also extends beyond the brewery itself. Last year, our Talk About London podcast explored Brick Lane and the forces shaping one of the capital’s most distinctive neighbourhoods. The conversation looked at its changing character, communities and economy, providing useful context for the debate now unfolding around the Truman Brewery. The proposed data centre is another chapter in a much longer story about how this part of East London adapts to change, and who benefits as it does.
A year later, the brewery has become part of a much wider London conversation.
Plans for the estate include a proposed data centre on land around Grey Eagle Street and Kelvin Street. Tower Hamlets Council refused the application in July 2025, appeals followed and a public inquiry began that October, with the Secretary of State subsequently intervening in the process.
The timing is significant. In June 2026, the Mayor of London set out an ambition for London to become a global leader in green data-centre innovation, alongside research warning that future demand for electricity connections from data centres could reach up to ten times current levels.
The new Draft London Plan also gives data centres their own strategic planning policy for the first time.
Something most Londoners rarely think about has become a city-planning question.
Photographs disappear into “the cloud”. Businesses store information online. Financial transactions travel across networks in fractions of a second. Artificial intelligence can generate an answer almost instantaneously.
Yet all of this depends on physical infrastructure: buildings filled with servers, connected by cables and supplied with electricity, while cooling systems deal with the heat the equipment produces.
The proposed Truman Brewery facility demonstrates why deciding where that infrastructure belongs is not necessarily straightforward.
Growing Places has argued that the facility would support businesses in the City and City fringe, including financial services where proximity can be important for very fast electronic transactions. Its reported power requirement of around four megawatts also makes it considerably smaller than the enormous hyperscale facilities associated with some forms of AI computing.
It would therefore be misleading to describe the Truman Brewery proposal simply as an “AI data centre”. But the controversy around it offers a tangible example of a much bigger issue accelerated by AI and the digital economy: London needs more digital infrastructure at the same time as it needs more homes, more electricity and better use of scarce urban land.
We have already seen what happens when those demands collide.
In 2022, electricity capacity constraints threatened to delay new housing connections in Ealing, Hillingdon and Hounslow, where the concentration of data centres had contributed to unusually high demand on the network.
The situation has since improved. Work involving City Hall and electricity network operators helped unlock additional capacity, and by early 2025 more than 12,000 affected homes had reportedly been connected.
Nevertheless, the episode exposed a challenge that will become increasingly important as London grows.
The capital is trying to build substantially more housing while electrifying transport and heating and expanding industries including technology and life sciences. Data centres are another major source of demand on the same electricity system.
London’s digital ambitions therefore cannot be planned separately from its housing and energy ambitions. The infrastructure behind AI may feel remote from everyday life, but its demands on the physical city are very real.
Brick Lane makes the land question particularly visible.
Opponents of the Truman Brewery proposals argue that such a prominent inner-London site should make a greater contribution to housing, particularly affordable and social housing. Growing Places has set out a broader regeneration vision that it argues will bring underused brownfield land back into productive use while supporting employment, commercial activity and London’s digital economy.
Having toured the site and heard directly about the ambitions for its regeneration, we know the Truman Brewery is not a blank piece of land awaiting a single use. It is a complex historic site embedded in one of London’s most distinctive neighbourhoods, where heritage, culture, commerce, housing and community identity already overlap.
The arrival of digital infrastructure adds another layer to that mix, and its impact is not necessarily invisible. As London Society trustee Clare Delmar recently explored in her own piece on data centres, communities elsewhere have raised concerns about noise, visual impact, water consumption, emissions and pressure on electricity networks. In places with significant concentrations of data centres, these facilities can be both highly visible and audible to the people living around them.
This makes design, location and community engagement important parts of the conversation.
There are signs that thinking is beginning to shift. The Mayor’s new Green Data Centre Innovation Plan puts greater emphasis on sustainable growth, while other initiatives and emerging industry frameworks are exploring how these buildings can be better designed and integrated into the communities around them.
The London Society has previously explored one potential benefit through HeatHubs, where waste heat generated by data centres could be captured and used to warm nearby homes, offices and public buildings.
This is one example of a wider principle. If London is going to accommodate substantial growth in digital infrastructure, the city should be clear about what it expects in return. Depending on the site, that could mean better design, effective noise mitigation, efficient use of energy and water, waste-heat recovery, investment in local infrastructure, skills and employment, or other tangible benefits for surrounding communities.
The debate can therefore move beyond a binary choice between supporting data centres or opposing them. London needs to establish what good data-cententre development looks like and ensure that the benefits and burdens are properly understood before decisions are made.
London has always depended on infrastructure that most people rarely think about until something goes wrong. Electricity, water, waste, logistics and communications all require physical space, and digital infrastructure is becoming another increasingly important part of that picture.
What is less visible is the connection between our own digital behaviour and the buildings required to support it. Every cloud service, AI application, digital payment and streamed film ultimately relies on physical infrastructure somewhere.
The controversy at the Truman Brewery brings that relationship into focus in a particularly complicated part of London.
When we visited last year, we were exploring how a historic site could adapt to another period of economic and social change. The debate taking place now is part of that story, but it also reflects a challenge facing the whole capital.
As London embraces artificial intelligence and an increasingly digital economy, it will need to accommodate the infrastructure that makes those technologies possible alongside demands for homes, energy and other essential services.
The opportunity is to make sure data centres are treated as part of city-making rather than simply as technical facilities. London has the chance to set higher expectations about where they are built, how they are designed, how resources are managed and what they contribute to the communities around them.
Brick Lane may be where this particular debate is playing out, but it is unlikely to be the last London neighbourhood asked to consider what living alongside the infrastructure of the digital economy actually means.
