Summary
- A former RBS/NatWest data centre at Packington Hill in Kegworth has been demolished after permission was granted in 2024.
- Hobden Estates has filed plans for a Class E commercial building with offices and parking on the Leicestershire site.
- The case shows how legacy enterprise data centre assets are being removed, repurposed, or overtaken by newer infrastructure requirements.
A former Royal Bank of Scotland and NatWest data centre at Packington Hill in Kegworth, Leicestershire, has been demolished and is set to be replaced by a commercial warehouse development.
Hobden Estates (Kegworth) Limited was granted permission in 2024 to demolish the former RBS Computer Centre. The developer has since filed plans with North West Leicestershire District Council for a Class E commercial building with offices and parking.
Planning officers have recommended approval, although local residents have submitted objections and Kegworth Parish Council is opposed to the development. The site lies around six miles north-west of Loughborough and 12 miles south-west of Nottingham.
Legacy facilities reach the end of their useful life
The former single-storey facility dated back to the mid-1970s, spanned 9,385 sq m on a 4.1-hectare plot, and originally housed IBM mainframe systems for NatWest. The bank exited and sold the site in 2021 after more than three decades of operation.
The Kegworth case shows that not all data centre property is being upgraded for AI, cloud, or colocation use. Some older enterprise sites no longer match the technical, commercial, or energy requirements of modern digital infrastructure. When that happens, demolition and reuse can be more plausible than retrofit.
Bank data centres from the mainframe era were often designed around specific institutional requirements: resilience for a single owner, secure access, heavy plant, and operational separation from public-facing offices. Many were not built for today’s colocation model, carrier diversity expectations, high-density racks, modular expansion, or efficient cooling.
Even where the buildings remain physically robust, their power architecture, floor layout, ceiling heights, plant rooms, and fibre position may make reuse difficult. A site designed for a previous generation of owned computing can become poorly aligned with the economics of modern digital infrastructure.
Reuse is not always digital
Financial institutions have shifted much of their infrastructure strategy towards cloud, colocation, and consolidated platforms, leaving a long tail of legacy assets. Some can be repurposed. Others are too small, too constrained, too inefficient, or too far from current network and customer demand to justify reinvestment.
The proposed warehouse redevelopment reflects broader land economics. A 4.1-hectare site with regional transport access may carry more value as logistics or commercial space than as an obsolete data centre. Cushman & Wakefield is marketing the future Packington Hill warehouse to potential occupiers, with the new building expected to total around 161,500 sq ft.
The contrast with the wider data centre boom is striking. Across Europe, developers are searching for land, power, and planning routes for new facilities, while some legacy data centre sites are being cleared for non-digital uses. Modern data centre demand is highly specific. A viable site needs not only land, but also deliverable power, fibre, cooling options, security geometry, planning compatibility, and a commercial reason to locate there.
Older facilities can carry hidden retrofit liabilities. Electrical plant may be end-of-life, cooling systems may be inefficient, roof and fabric upgrades may be required, and the building’s internal configuration may not support current rack densities. Bringing such a site up to modern standards can cost more than the asset is worth, particularly if power or connectivity is limited.
The Kegworth redevelopment also shows that planning risk does not disappear when a data centre closes. Local objections to warehouse schemes can centre on traffic, noise, visual impact, land use, and employment claims. The community-facing issues change, but the planning system remains a constraint.
The site once housed bank computing infrastructure for an era of mainframes and owned systems. Its next likely use is commercial warehousing — a lower-tech but commercially plausible reuse of land that no longer appears to fit the requirements of modern digital infrastructure.
