The merest sniff of one of these in your area...
...and the value of your home is going to drop.
Google meets the neighbors and gets both barrels over its new UK datacenter
EXCLUSIVE Google invited residents living near its newly built datacenter north of London to meet the team at the local council offices on Wednesday evening – and was met with a barrage of complaints about poor consultation, noise, and light pollution. The Waltham Cross Datacenter (WXT), which was officially opened last year, …
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Saturday 25th July 2026 01:26 GMT David 164
Re: The merest sniff of one of these in your area...
In loughton, it -0.6% but I'm guess it would be impossible to prove that the data center and not the fact that interest rates are much higher than a few years ago and people simply can no longer afford to pay what they would a couple of years ago.
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Friday 24th July 2026 10:27 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: The merest sniff of one of these in your area...
There was a time when behind Berrylands station, which was 1 stop north of Surbiton on the line to London Waterloo had open aeration and settling ponds at the sewage works there.
Kingston Polytechnic must have got the nearby land cheap to build their student accommodation.
You had to hold your breath as much as possible if you took a stopping service when it stopped Berrylands.
Years later, they redeveloped the works and those open ponds are no longer in use
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Saturday 1st August 2026 09:48 GMT druck
Re: The merest sniff of one of these in your area...
At least with a sewage farm it invokes some childhood memories of beach holidays in the 1970s*.
*I was walking through the village many years ago, when I thought I could smell the sea just like my family holidays in Devon in the 70s, then I came around the corner and found some road works with a warning sign for sewage works, I realised exactly what I'd been playing in as a child.
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Friday 24th July 2026 09:14 GMT Fr. Ted Crilly
well um
No one's done it yet so I will...
“But the plans were on display…”
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
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Friday 24th July 2026 09:14 GMT Anonymous Coward
Scunthorpe
3 datacenters planned for Scunthorpe.
They've only announced capacity plans for one of them. It requires more electricity than the ENTIRE current household usage of Yorkshire, Humberside and Lincolnshire COMBINED and the water equivalent of over 100,000 homes.
Meanwhile, the proles are being told to not use hosepipes and that if we don't immediately swap to an energy efficient toaster we're directly responsible for the death of every human on the planet.
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Friday 24th July 2026 10:40 GMT david 12
Re: Scunthorpe
That's just an ambit claim.
So that when they come back with the new plans (Water equivalent of only 20,000 homes!, less electricity than the ENTIRE current household usage of Yorkshire!), the planning bodies can give them credit for the massive reduction. (Only 3 stories higher than the height limit!)
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Friday 24th July 2026 09:42 GMT Anonymous Coward
It is our own fault
That the likes of Google, Amazon and the other usual Suspects try to build monstrosities like this. Google this, Google that, Google Docs etc etc etc.
If you live close to one of the things and use the services provided by the operator then you know who to blame.
I avoid Google, Amazon and Microslop like the plague. I know you can't erase them from your like completely because of AWS, AZURE etc but not using the stuff where they track your every mouse click, key press keeps your internet footprint to a minimum.
Oh, and FSCK all ads. I never buy anything that is advertised to me. I've been doing that since 2010.
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Friday 24th July 2026 12:40 GMT cyberdemon
Re: 77 MW of IT capacity
Or they could quote it in units of actual output i.e. 77MW is about 6000 continuous slop-streams of fake Veo2-generated video, according to my fag-packet (based on my reading that a 5-second clip uses 1kWh, so an hour clip might be 12kWh i.e. a continuous fake nigel farage would use 12kW to talk endless slop on GB news without sleeping, and with an attention span of 5 seconds)
Then, they could consider the "value" of said output, and the value of slop is plainly negative..
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Friday 24th July 2026 13:04 GMT katrinab
Re: 77 MW of IT capacity
Or, the average household in Waltham Forest consumes 2309.4 kWh/year of electricity - source https://www.ons.gov.uk/explore-local-statistics/indicators/domestic-electricity-consumption
There are 8760 hours in a year, so that means the average power draw of a house in that borough is 263W. Which means that it uses the same amount of electricity as 292775 households.
There are only 102900 households in the borough, source https://www.walthamforest.gov.uk/council-and-elections/about-us/statistics-about-borough
so it is using almost 3x as much electricity as all the residents of the borough put together.
And, it is basically a 77MW fan heater, so of course it is going to make the local area a bit hotter.
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Friday 24th July 2026 17:23 GMT doublelayer
Re: 77 MW of IT capacity
For most of the factors we care about, power is a suitable metric. That accurately describes the power requirements, the heat output, and to some extent, the cooling needs. It doesn't express the amount of computation, but I wonder whether you could suggest something that could since it would depend on the specific processors being installed, and even the builders don't know exactly what type of chips they're going to put there. Even if we did know, there aren't great units for compute capacity, though we can do some calculations and give it a number of petaflops at a certain precision. Also, if you did report both values, the power one is the one that would be mostly stable, whereas the flops count would change whenever hardware was upgraded or they adjusted what they're using the DC for.
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Friday 24th July 2026 11:05 GMT Nifty
In September 2024, the UK government officially designated data centres as Critical National Infrastructure, putting them on equal footing with water, energy, and emergency services.
This means that standard local residents' objections can be and are overridden. Complaining about Broxbourne council may be a waste of time.
And I'm wondering how Google manages to afford British industrial electricity. Surely paying for that contravenes its duty to shareholders?
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Friday 24th July 2026 11:47 GMT Anonymous Coward
That is true, and it's a problem because it allows the government to override the local council's decision. It effectively diverts the big brown envelope from the council to the government.
However, the council could already override the residents because resident's objections carry zero legal weight in the planning decision process. The whole objection system is just a sham to make local residents think they have some say in the matter. The planning officer's only criteria is to determine whether or not the application complies with planning laws, and usually the developers have expensive lawyers who try to stretch the law as far as possible and push through plans for things they know damn well are unlawful.
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Friday 24th July 2026 11:24 GMT Brewster's Angle Grinder
"if you'd listened to people, we wouldn't be here right now."
When they say that, what they really mean is "you didn't do what we wanted". (I have a lot of sympathy. I wouldn't want live next to a bitbarn and would do my best to stop it.) But it infuriates me up that people think "listening" inevitably leads to doing what they asked for. There is no sense of other people saying different things and having to balance competing priorities.
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Friday 24th July 2026 12:50 GMT Anonymous Coward
Local authorities
Don'ch'a luv'em!
I was a local councillor for many years. Unusual one, me, because I was not a developer. Chair of the next council up the tree was an old-style property-inheriting Posh Fat Bastard, with an army of droids to bury all the facts but the plummy voice and smarmy smirk. They were the only ones who got paid any money, the rest were pleased when they were treated no worse than ear wax. Bizarrely, local government has evolved to cement these not-criminals-how-could-you-say-such-a-thing-can-I-fob-you-off-or-must-I-buy-you-off in place behind an impossible labyrinth of bureaucracy. How can that have happened?
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Friday 24th July 2026 17:41 GMT Tron
Re: Local authorities
Local govt. fraud is generally easier to get away with than national govt. fraud. Burnham plans to decentralise aspects of the state, so there will be a lot more opportunities to get away with stuff at a local level in the near future. 'Private Eye' has been documenting the scams that do surface for decades. Most of it never reaches the mainstream media. The fraud never ends. It's just the names of the perpetrators that change.
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Friday 24th July 2026 13:44 GMT Boris the Cockroach
Re: physical tax?
No, as you'll find out no british user is allowed to use the data centers in britain, therefore no transaction takes place within britain and therefore google earns the taxable profits abroad.
Further more, due to all google DCs in britain running at a loss due to water/power consumption, that entitles google to tax relief on any google transaction that does take place here.
Hope that clarifies your point
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Friday 24th July 2026 18:00 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: actual physical footprint
They do have other places in the UK. There is a big place next to BMW UK's HQ in Cove, Hampshire (edge of Farnborough and near J4A of the M3)
It used to be the UK HQ of Nokia. AFAIK, they have a campus near St Pancras Station in London.
Yes to them paying 95% tax on all transactions. Google is evil personified.
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Friday 24th July 2026 13:23 GMT short
Google's commitment was to hold a meeting with locals. Box ticked. There's no way they'll actually do anything substantive, they DGAF, and why should they? The UK is woefully short of people who'll shoot playfully at / into infrastructure projects, USA-style.
Until you've had something dumped on you, destroying your life / livelihood, you don't really appreciate the NIMBY fury. There's no upside, no compensation, they just take your land and fuck you over forever. You can't stay, can't leave. With NSIPs, it's backed up by the government, too, so you have zero recourse except ranting on comment sections.
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Friday 24th July 2026 14:41 GMT rg287
rather than useful suggestions more trees, turning lights off after a certain time
Eh, they're not even going to do the easy things - even though they could.
A well known UK manufacturing firm built a large factory within eyeline of my parent's house (although they've got a couple of miles separation). The plans showed lots of planting along the embankments that were raised around the perimeter. In theory you shouldn't have been able to see any part of the building once it was mature. But they never did, and the council certainly weren't going to make them. You can't see the factory from the road going past it because they used the foundation spoil to raise earthworks as a screen, but of course you can see it from further back (i.e. most of their neighbours).
There's loads of light pollution because the exterior floodlights are all above the height of the perimeter berm.
All commercial lighting is fundamentally facing the wrong way. You have big floodlights on the building facing out, because it's cheap to install them there (bolted to the wall, you already have power in the building). The reality ought to be that whether you turn the lights off at night shouldn't be an issue because you should mount any required floods at the perimeter facing in. No risk of locals having light beaming through their bedroom windows then.
But they won't because that costs a bit of money - putting in a buried cable round the perimeter, raising lights on poles instead of on the building. And obviously we're all well aware that in a £300m build, fitting lighting in a fashion that doesn't ruin life for your neighbours is the straw that will break the camel's back. Everything must be done in the cheapest way possible so you can book record profits and the chairman can have a new Gulfstream.
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Friday 24th July 2026 14:53 GMT Yet Another Anonymous coward
Re: Complainants backgrounds......
I don't want an airport, trainline, motorway, sewage works, hospital, quarry or other houses anywhere near my house
Obviously I want to use airports,trains, motorways, hospitals etc but I don't want them to affect the price of my house. I'll vote for any politician that will effectively block and development.
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Friday 24th July 2026 21:31 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Complainants backgrounds......
I thought all or nearly all UK railroads were without level crossings, so living next to one shouldn't be a problem because you won't have horns blaring at all hours. I live about 1.2km from a main freight line, but since there are no level crossings within 4km, i only hear the horns if the wind is blowing hard from precisely that direction...
And these days, that just reminds me that civilisation hasn't collapsed yet.
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Saturday 25th July 2026 21:25 GMT rg287
Re: Complainants backgrounds......
I thought all or nearly all UK railroads were without level crossings,
Lol.
Inter-city mainlines mostly, branch lines (even quite large ones), no.
It is policy to remove them as and when major renewals allow, and they certainly aren't building any new ones, but in some places this is extremely difficult - e.g. where the line runs right through a village and there's no way to grade-separate the railway from roads because of butted up housing. The only options would be a road bridge higher than the adjacent housing, or to close the line for a year and fully cut-and-cover it. There's a section of West Coast Mainline in Staffordshire that has at least 4 (IIRC) level crossings in the space of a couple of miles (running through Stone and Barlaston). Notionally a 110mph line - but when I used to work around there some trains didn't look like they're were making double digits!
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Sunday 26th July 2026 12:53 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Complainants backgrounds......
"I don't want an airport, trainline, motorway, sewage works, hospital, quarry or other houses anywhere near my house
Obviously I want to use airports,trains, motorways, hospitals etc but I don't want them to affect the price of my house. I'll vote for any politician that will effectively block and development."
How much is the daily heil these days?
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Saturday 25th July 2026 14:34 GMT Sproggit
Suggested Condition
How about...
The government enacts a law that says that if any multinational corporation wants to conduct business in the UK, they must form a wholly-owned subsidiary and all UK-related business must be conducted in the UK, under UK law. The provisions of this new UK law would further state that taxation of said company profits would only permit *UK* expense deductions and NOT cross-border licensing deals.
In other words, that would prevent Google - and others (Starbucks, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, et al) from spiriting away their profits and bleeding the UK Exchequer of legitimate tax revenue.
Because - let's not forget - anything that corporations don't pay in "corporation tax", we will end up paying in "Income Tax".
It is way past time that the government closed all these tax loopholes. Way pays time.
And please don't tell me that this isn't possible. If we have to pay 20% VAT for goods and services that we buy off e.g. Amazon, then the purchase takes place in the UK, under UK tax law. So Amazon can damned well pay corporation tax in the UK as well. This one change would put *billions* a year back in to the UK Exchequer...
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Saturday 25th July 2026 16:45 GMT Sproggit
Re: Suggested Condition
Three observations in response...
First is - the lack of "inward investment" that you rightly point out would be a consideration might be significantly offset by tax receipts from companies that decided to stay.
Second is - the foreign multinationals have clearly remained because they see a market here - so if they decided to quit because they didn't like a level taxation playing field - well, that would leave an established market open for UK companies...
Third is, "half a loaf is better than no bread" - if a commercial entity had to choose between making a profit and paying some tax on it on the one hand... or making no profit on the other... which do you think they would choose?
I've heard the "inward investment" story done to death... but the UK is the 5th largest economy in the world. Do you really think multinationals operating in the UK would simply up and leave in a fit of pique? Put another way, shareholders have ousted CEOs and/or file lawsuits for less. Not going to happen.
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Monday 27th July 2026 08:33 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Suggested Condition
> - if a commercial entity had to choose between making a profit and paying some tax on it on the one hand... or making no profit on the other... which do you think they would choose?
I think they'll choose to concentrate on places where they can make the most money, and ignore the places where they don't. Look at the energy companies that are abandoning the UK due to north sea taxation and licensing policies.
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Monday 27th July 2026 08:38 GMT Mast1
Re: What was there before?
".....They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot....."
Credit: Joni Mitchell, 1970.
Don't get me started on solar farms being put on prime farmland (at least in UK), with the added by product of an 'eco reserve'.
What happens when prices rise on world food markets ?
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