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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