‘Future-proofing Croydon’: Meta’s Prometheus AI datacenter ‘supercluster’ in Ohio. Westfield wants to build a data centre on the site of the Whitgift Centre
The latest public consultation on the long-delayed regeneration of the town centre offers little detail about the property speculators’ money-spinning proposals for the old Whitgift Centre. By STEVEN DOWNES
In the United States this week, data centres (or, in American, datacenters) were on the ballot paper in the mid-term elections in around 40 areas.
The American public rejected almost every one of them.
Here in Croydon, Unibail Rodamco Westfield, the Paris-based property speculators, have spent the past month running what is supposed to be a public consultation over their latest ideas for regenerating the town centre. Their 25-page brochure and accompanying questionnaire barely mentions that part of their latest proposals is to build a data centre.
After 15 years of zero progress and little real investment in what was once promised to be a £1.4billion regeneration, this is the seventh Westfield consultation, and the second to be staged this year.
High rise: URW has used AI to generate much of its consultation materials this time around
None of the previous six has resulted in a single brick being laid or wall demolished. Although, as landlords, Westfield have been undertaking a pretty thorough job of driving out long-standing tenants from the Whitgift Centre.
Previous Westfield predictions, in 2023, that the regeneration scheme could take as long as 15 years are now beginning to look ludicrously optimistic.
Planning applications were submitted and rubber-stamped by the pliant local council, in 2014 and again in 2018, when Westfield increased the number of flats it wanted to build to 1,000. That’s looking all-too-modest compared with the 4,000 flats they are saying they want to build now, in 30-to-45-storey skyscrapers arranged along Wellesley Road.
The 4,000 flats figure was revealed at a Town Hall planning meeting at the end of September. There, URW’s suits’ mantra was “viability”, as they announced that they now wanted to build double the number of flats on the site than they had said they would develop as recently as their last consultation in March.
As Inside Croydon was first to report, URW bought the Whitgift Centre freehold from the Whitgift Foundation in July in a £31.5million deal.
Sources in the building industry suggest that 2026’s second consultation might be because, having managed to squeeze bargain basement prices out of Hammersons for Centrale and then the Whitgift Foundation for the town centre freehold, Westfield are now looking at their Croydon exit strategy.
They really mean it: council planning officials mentioned the data centre proposal three times in the September report
“This consultation will allow them to tell the council’s planners that they ‘have widespread support’,” according to the well-placed source.
“But it looks as if it could be a valuation exercise in order to sell their interest.”
It also looks like a public consultation exercise intended to sneak the possibility of a data centre into their money-making mix.
A report to the planning committee meeting held on September 24 said, “The outline proposals are currently for a residential-led mixed-use scheme with open streets and public spaces with a range of uses including in the region of 3,000 to 4,000 new homes, mixed commercial space (including retail, food and beverage, leisure, community, culture and workspace) and potential for wider uses such as education, hotel and micro logistics hub and/or data centre.”
That was one of three mentions of a possible data centre in the official council papers.
Westfield and their PR flaks have called their latest consultation The Croydon Project, as if the entire population of Croydon is some kind of vast sociological experiment. After all, the Met Police used Croydon residents as their experimental guinea pigs for Live Facial Recognition. Perhaps one of Westfield’s public relations advisers has a fixation on Squid Game, or some other, equally dystopian, view of the future?
Blink and you’ll miss it: the only mention of a data centre in URW’s consultation materials is brief, bland and buried deep in their glossy brochure (see below)
In the glossy sales brochure of AI-generated images and AI-slop written content which has accompanied Westfield’s month-long consultation, there is but a single reference to “Data centre space”, hidden in a small panel on a spread headlined “Futureproofing [sic] the town centre”.
Blink, and you’ll miss it.
Which is undoubtedly what Westfield hopes will happen in the vast majority of cases.
There’s a reason for that deviousness.
Data centres, or datacenters, are among the reasons that Donald Trump’s Republicans, and their Big Tech billionaire backers, took what American political analysts have called a shellacking in Tuesday’s mid-term elections.
“Datacenters, the facilities full of semiconductor chips that power artificial intelligence and a host of other online products, were on the ballot in elections in at least 40 jurisdictions across 10 states,” The Grauniad reported. “Voters responded with a strong rebuke of the giant buildings, which have has become a symbol of the tech industry and AI.”
Warning from America: how The Grauniad reported the ‘pushback’ against Big Tech at the mid-terms
In Ohio, at least 14 municipalities passed bans or restrictions on data centre development. This includes blocking a $2billion project proposed by Amazon. “In Emporia, Kansas, where a 1,000-acre gigawatt-scale datacenter was recently proposed, a ban on high-impact datacenters was approved by voters,” said The Grauniad report.
Only in Hardwood, North Dakata, was a bill that would impose restrictions on data centre development rejected by voters.
“Where datacenters were not explicitly on the ballot, officials who have pushed back against their development were elected,” the newspaper said.
The question in Croydon must be: which local politicians are “pushing back” against Westfield’s data centre?
Read more: Westfield now want a data centre plus 4,000 flats in town centre
Read more: SOLD! Westfield in £31.5m deal to buy Whitgift Centre freehold
Read more: Westfield reveal consultation and more delays on ‘masterplan’
- Westfield’s 15-year takeover of Croydon town centre – check out our essential timeline by clicking here
- For Inside Croydon’s unmatched archive of the Westfield saga, click here
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