Proposed Frogmore Data Centre represents all that is wrong with the priorities of Brent and Ealing Labour controlled Councils

 Campaigning against the Frogmore Industrial Estate Data Centre

   

Guest Post by  Cllr Suzanne Gallagher (Brent Green Party, Kilburn Ward)

As local representatives, our primary duty is to protect the health, wellbeing, and living standards of our communities. That is why I, alongside my Green colleagues across Brent and Ealing, have submitted a formal, rigorous objection to the Old Oak and Park Royal Development Corporation (OPDC) planning committee regarding the reserved matters application (ref: 26/0107/PAOPDC) for a massive new data centre at Frogmore Industrial Estate on Acton Lane. 

While outline permission for a data centre was granted back in 2022, the specific layout, scale, and environmental strategy currently being proposed are fundamentally unacceptable. Standing in solidarity with the residents of the nearby Wesley Estate, we cannot allow this development to move forward in its current form. 

Living in the Shadow of Tech Expansion

The immediate physical impacts on the Wesley Estate are severe. The applicant is proposing massive structures reaching up to 37 metres in height, positioned just 19 metres from people’s front doors on Wesley Avenue, Harold Road, and Newark Crescent. 

At this extreme proximity, residents will suffer a devastating loss of daylight, privacy, and visual amenity. To make matters worse, the landscaping plans offer only "token planting" rather than the substantial, mature green buffering our communities deserve. Add to this the threat of heavy traffic on Acton Lane, a vital lifeline for emergency vehicles accessing Central Middlesex Hospital, and a local water grid that Thames Water explicitly warns cannot support this demand, and it becomes clear that local residents are being expected to absorb all the disruption. 

The Microclimate Crisis: Park Royal’s Extreme Heat Island Effect

While the loss of daylight and traffic pressures are reason enough to object, as a Green councillor, I am deeply alarmed by the severe climate consequences of cramming yet another data centre into our corner of West London. 

We have all felt the brutal reality of the climate crisis right on our doorsteps. London has been hammered by extreme, record-breaking heatwaves, smashing temperature records and pushing public health services and infrastructure to the absolute limit. This isn't a distant threat; it is our lived reality.

Looking ahead, the Met Office’s climate modeling shows a terrifying trajectory: sustained heatwave scenarios in the coming decades could push peak temperatures in England to an astonishing 45°C.

Against this backdrop of extreme warming, approving this proposal would mark approximately the twelfth data centre operating in the Park Royal and North Acton area. We are not looking at an isolated building; we are looking at an overwhelming, compounding heat engine. 

Data centres generate immense industrial heat. Empirical research from Cambridge University reveals that concentrated clusters of data centres generate a distinct, artificially elevated local "heat island effect," raising surrounding neighborhood temperatures by average levels of 2 degrees. We’ve already seen ground temperatures at a parking lot adjacent to the Slough data centre cluster hit 45 degrees during severe weather, 6 degrees higher than nearby Windsor. 

As summer heatwaves grow longer and more punishing, turning Park Royal into a localised heat engine is a direct threat to urban climate resilience. Forcing families on the Wesley Estate to live inside an artificially intensified microclimate, where cooling down during tropical nights becomes virtually impossible, is an unacceptable environmental injustice. 

Local Failures: A Complete Lack of Extreme Heat Preparedness

What makes this proposal even harder to swallow is our glaring failure at a council and regional level to prepare our local area for the extreme heat ahead. We are simply not ready.

Just recently, Kilburn Library had to shut its doors during extreme heat, a tragic irony given that it recently received £1.1 million in funding for a major renovation, yet remained completely vulnerable to rising temperatures.

Across our ward and the wider borough of Brent, there is a severe shortage of designated "cool spaces", public, accessible buildings where vulnerable residents can seek refuge and experience lower temperatures during dangerous heat spikes. Our community gardens, which are a respite from extreme heat with their cool shade and soft breeze, are under threat. For example, the Granville Rec in South Kilburn is reaping its final harvest this year before the volunteers tending to its garden hand the keys over to Regeneration.

Because the UK does not yet have embedded climate adaptation and resilience build standards, the Rec will likely be replaced by homes with inadequate design and control measures in place to ensure they are built to be truly climate-resilient against extreme heat as predicted by the Met. Approving a heat-generating data centre while our residential and public infrastructure buckles under extreme temperatures is ironic beyond measure.

The "Green" Promises

The applicant attempts to frame the development as environmentally friendly by linking it to future waste-heat reuse networks and backup generator fuel promises. But when you look closely at the details, these claims fall apart. The applicant points to the HEMIKO/OPEN district heat network, but this system is non-operational and won't be fully delivered until between 2028 and 2040. In the interim, vast amounts of waste heat will simply be dumped straight into our local atmosphere. Furthermore, industry analysis (including from Kao Data) confirms that AI workloads create extreme volatility in heat output, making colocation data centres an unpredictable, unreliable source for district heating. 

Residents Must Come First

We cannot allow the compounding, cumulative impacts of North Acton and Park Royal’s industrial tech expansion to erode the basic living standards of Brent and Ealing residents. 

The OPDC planning committee must put the climate resilience and wellbeing of our community ahead of corporate convenience. We are calling on the committee to reject this layout, enforce substantial setback distances, demand iron-clad environmental monitoring, and ensure our local microclimate is protected. 

The formal objection was submitted on behalf of the Brent Green Group (Cllrs Suzanne Gallagher, Stephen Malonga, Paul Ryan, Mary Mitchell, Amandine Alexandre, Keith Perrin, Nisha Vakani, Iman Ahmadi Moghaddam, and Najib Warsame) and the Ealing Green Group (Cllrs Clare Welsby, Natalia Kubica, Andrew Walkley, Marijn van de Geer, and Husam Alharahsheh).

 

 

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