Save Brick Lane: Art, Community, and a Data Centre

In this photomontage / collage I’ve brought three different images together. Behind the cyclist (taken in Bishopsgate in 2021) are two images from the East End taken in the 1980s.

The bicycle suggests someone who can move forward easily, while the trolley suggests someone carrying the past with them. I’m capturing people who are simply passing through the same place (at different times) but experiencing completely different realities. The two figures from the 1980s are fully aware of their surroundings whereas the young man is absorbed by his phone looking at instructions about where to take the food order. The pace of his life is entirely different from the other subjects and largely shaped by digital technology. The man with the umbrella is walking past a shop in Brick Lane that was demolished a year later.

The government has just approved a massive data centre on the Truman brewery site on Brick Lane. In recent years there’s have been demonstrations and public meetings, including protests specifically demanding ‘homes, not data centres’.

The Save Brick Lane campaign is a grassroots coalition involving residents, community organisations, charities and people with longstanding connections to Spitalfields and Banglatown. It’s been campaigning against the wider Truman redevelopment since 2020. The approved scheme includes a 5,200 m² data centre, while campaigners argue that the land should instead contribute to housing; the wider development provides 44 homes, only six of them social housing, whereas the community-led alternative has focused on hundreds of homes. I know whose side I’m on!