Greenwich Council has said it is opposed to plans to build a data centre on the Charlton riverside, with a senior councillor branding the scheme “a nuisance” for existing and future residents.
A 100,000-square metre centre, the size of 14 football pitches, is planned for land off Anchor and Hope Lane, near the Thames and behind housing at Atlas and Derrick Gardens.
Historic buildings that were part of the old Stones Foundries site would be demolished as part of the scheme. The developer GLI also plans to build space for small businesses and the community.
Greenwich Council and City Hall hope to see 8,000 homes built in the wider Charlton riverside in the coming years, and Tom Creswell, the cabinet member in charge of planning, told a council meeting on Wednesday night that the data centre was not compatible with those plans.
He was asked about the issue by Jo van den Broek, a Labour councillor for Charlton Village & Riverside, who said the scheme would use “up vast amounts of water and energy and produce constant heat and noise from its operation and its generators”.
Creswell said: “Let me be unequivocal on this. This Labour administration does not support the data centre proposal in Charlton. No ifs, no buts.
“We want to deliver thousands of new homes and 1,000 new jobs in Charlton Riverside. We don’t think a data centre does that. We think it will take up too much space. It will be a nuisance for existing residents and also the residents who we hope to move in in these new homes.
“We think it won’t be environmentally friendly. We want the development at Charlton Riverside to be based in climate resilience, and a data centre doesn’t accord with that in the slightest. So I’m very happy to be completely unequivocal about that. We do not support the data centre as an administration.”
No full planning application has been submitted, but last month documents were filed with the planning department asking if an environmental impact assessment needed to be carried out.
It is unusual for the council to state its opposition to a proposed development so early and in such strident terms, and comes two years after the Labour government declared data centres critical national infrastructure.
While GLI already has permission for a warehouse just south of the data centre site, there is still a masterplan for housing in the area which could be used as evidence against a planning application.
The proposed data centre development is next to a site owned by the Hyde housing association which has permission for over 1,200 new homes. The council also owns industrial land on both sides of the data centre site and has ambitions to build homes there.
Last week the council announced a partnership with Hyde to prepare a new masterplan for the central part of the riverside site, which it said could accommodate 3,000 homes.
GLI began buying land in Charlton after a plan for 770 homes behind Atlas and Derrick Gardens was thrown out on appeal in 2020. The Stones site, one of the area’s last remaining major industrial concerns, was sold to a housing developer which later sold the land on to GLI.
There are already a number of data centres on the north bank of the Thames, with work well under way on a giant facility on a former paint factory site in Silvertown, opposite the Greenwich Peninsula.
GLI says that the Charlton centre will restrict its water consumption by using a “dry” cooling system, reusing water rather than continually drawing fresh supplies from the mains.
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