A blog by Buglife Programmes Manager, Jamie Robins.
Data centres. There are few topics that generate such heated discussion. Often, they generate anger and frustration at the unstoppable force of big tech erecting towering, energy and water-hungry data centres throughout the countryside. They rouse local communities in opposition, but also stimulate important discussions about what our countryside is actually for.
Understandably, people are fearful of the fields around them being lost to these bastions of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and big data, replacing the landscapes that people have valued and admired for their entire lives. This is before the societal and ethical implications of AI are considered, with public debates about who exactly they are set to benefit.
But in a corner of Thurrock, one thing is certain- the beneficiary won’t be nature. While many data centres are springing up on arable fields or flowerless grazed paddocks, the Thurrock Data Centre Campus, proposed by Google, would replace the busy hum of bugs on one of Essex’s finest Local Wildlife Sites with the drone of data centre cooling systems. A nationally important habitat replaced with row after row of computers.
Wedged between the sprawling Lakeside Retail Park and Mar Dyke river sits the former Arena Essex Raceway, a 52-hectare wildlife haven. Its complex history of quarrying, industry and speedway racing has produced a unique mosaic of brownfield features, calcareous grassland, flowery Thames Terrace Grassland, bare ground, scrub and young woodland. As well as being a Local Wildlife Site, it is an important part of the Thames Estuary North Important Invertebrate Area network. This in a landscape that has suffered repeated losses of Local Wildlife Sites to development, which will be worsened by the expanding Port of Tilbury and the imminent Lower Thames Crossing.
This hidden secret in Thurrock has no public rights of way, but much of the site has been used for many years for fishing and informal walking and cycling. It is also home to hundreds of species of invertebrates, including Brown-banded Carder Bee (Bombus humilis), Five-banded Weevil-wasp (Cerceris quinquefasciata) and the Dingy Skipper butterfly (Erynnis tages) – with many more to be found – as well as rare plants such as Endangered Broad-leaved Cudweed (Filago pyramidata) and birds such as Red Listed Nightingale (Luscinia megarhynchos). All of which have thrived alongside the site’s speedway and stock car racing activity, until the track was closed in 2018, depriving the local community of a much-loved sporting and recreational venue.
If it gets the green light, the Google data campus plans would lead to over 80% of this precious Open Mosaic Habitat on Previously Developed Land being lost, including areas of irreplaceable Thames Terrace Grasslands – a unique habitat that Natural England say is now limited to just tens of hectares. Meanwhile, Google claims in its 2025 Sustainability Report of “Cultivating nature on our campuses” and “rebuilding nature in the very places it’s been paved over”, while at Thurrock they boast that “A substantial part of the site is preserved for nature and woodland enhancements, to be managed in perpetuity.”
In reality, Thurrock is a microcosm of all that is wrong with our planning system and approach to development. Data centres rolled out at all costs and often against the wishes of the people who live nearby, building on precious brownfields despite their recognised importance, concreting over Local Wildlife Sites, disregard for carbon and water use, sweeping threatened species concerns aside and after the expected 49% loss of biodiversity on site, the proposed compensation will be 37 miles away as the crow flies. For Thurrock, it is yet another loss. It has generated local anger alongside responses from Buglife, Essex Wildlife Trust, Essex Field Club, Butterfly Conservation Cambridge & Essex Branch, Plantlife, Foxglove and the Thurrock Hammers speedway club. It has received national criticism about its carbon calculations, which are reported to have been underestimated fivefold and will be comparable with the emissions of an international airport. All while habitats and species are ignored, and the solution? Move them somewhere else.
Buglife is calling on Google to demonstrate the spirit displayed in their own sustainability report, reverse course and spare this unique wildlife site and for Thurrock Council to show an urgent commitment to nature recovery and refuse this destructive application. Buglife even wrote to the Google UK Managing Director in August last year raising many of these concerns, but, a year on, has yet to receive a response. A Buglife-led petition already has over 30,000 supporters, demonstrating the strength of feeling.
While there are important conversations to be had about data centres · where they should go, who they benefit, the environmental impacts of their carbon and water use · one thing is clear, it isn’t on our vital Local Wildlife Sites, and Google should search somewhere else.