The decision overrules Tower Hamlets Council, the local mayor and the Save Brick Lane campaign, a coalition of nine resident groups who opposed the scheme.

The approval came through ministerial recovery of planning appeals, meaning the Secretary of State took the final decision rather than leaving it with the local authority. The masterplan from developers Truman Estates Ltd and Zeloof LLP includes five new office buildings, a 5,200 sq ft data centre on Grey Eagle Street, a cinema, a supermarket, market space and 44 residential units. Of those homes, six are earmarked for social rent.

Tower Hamlets wanted a housing-led scheme instead. The borough has more than 30,000 households on its social housing waiting list, and the council argued the site should prioritise homes over commercial development. According to reporting on the decision letter, the government gave that housing case no more than limited weight, while giving the data centre significant weight for meeting what it called the need for data centre capacity, without specifying how many jobs the facility would create.

The site itself is small by data centre standards. At 5,200 sq ft, it bears no resemblance to the hyperscale campuses reshaping planning battles in Texas, Virginia or Lagos. That is what makes the decision worth attention. Data centres were designated Critical National Infrastructure in the UK in September 2024, a status that gives data centre planning applications additional regulatory weight when set against competing local priorities. Brick Lane is the clearest domestic test yet of what that designation means in practice: even a modest, community-opposed urban scheme can now clear planning on CNI-related grounds, in a borough where local and elected opposition was unanimous.

Tom Larsson, chief executive of development manager Grow Places, called the decision a significant milestone. Save Brick Lane described it as deeply disappointing.

The pattern isn’t new to Capacity’s coverage, just smaller in scale. In Central Texas, hyperscale data centre development has faced sustained pushback over water use, with projections that the sector could use 2.7% of the state’s water by 2030.

Capacity has also asked whether community pushback is becoming the standard cost of AI infrastructure, comparing Google’s Andhra Pradesh site to the Texas experience. Those fights are about campuses drawing hundreds of megawatts and millions of gallons of water.

Brick Lane is one building inside a mixed-use scheme, and it still took a ministerial override to get through. If a 5,200 sq ft data centre needs that intervention, the CNI designation is carrying real weight even at the small end of the market, not just on the hyperscale sites where power and water dominate the argument.

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