A cloud hangs over Bulls Bridge

I WENT to a meeting in the historic Grand Junction Pub this week, once the home of an infamous Reggae Night but these days a rather posh Indian Restaurant, writes Andrew Bailes.

Cloud storage

Present were some bright young representatives from Global Technical Realty, the developers and owners of a number of huge new Data Centres spreading out along the GWR route out of London toward Reading. These repositories of cat photographs and fleetingly amusing memes are where the ironically misnamed 'Cloud Storage' happens.

At the meeting we were able to peruse the information boards (follow the link below to see 'em) which describe the planned construction of some frankly enormous blank sheds on the corner of the site presently occupied by the mixed warehouses and workshops of the International Trading Estate, Southall. At present most of these are around three stories high, and a few date from as far back as the late-Victorian redevelopment of Southall's old brickyards and tips.

As you can see, their planned replacements would loom large over the canal junction, over Waterside Moorings' Willow Wren Wharf site, and pitch into semi-permanent darkness the moorings, both public and private on the Paddington Arm at Bulls Bridge. For anyone familiar with the location, one can get a good sense of the scale of this proposed development by comparing the light blue outlines of the data centres with the pale grey of the existing Conways tarmac recycling tower in the top left hand corner of the image.

Massive bulk

There is of course the promise of some green space and towpath improvements, but these pale into insignificance when compared to the massive bulk of the data centres (imagine your computer's hard drive 'tower' laid on its side in a model village and you'll get a sense of their impact on the landscape).

Bulls Bridge and environs may not be beautiful, but if you like me would like to see them at least not completely subsumed by modern development, please consider expressing your point-of-view in the developers' survey on the following link: https://itedatacentre.com/