Why Warehousing and Data Centre Growth Needs Strategic Landscape Thinking

Why Warehousing and Data Centre Growth Needs Strategic Landscape Thinking

The scale and pace of warehousing and data centre development across the UK is only going to increase. Logistics sheds continue to spread along motorway corridors, and data centres, driven by the demands of cloud computing and AI, are being proposed at a rate that has caught planning policy and infrastructure providers off guard. Both building types share a common characteristic: they are large, singular, and often treated as isolated developments dropped into the landscape, connected to little more than a road and a substation. If we want this next wave of development to sit comfortably in our landscapes, rather than erode them, we need to think more strategically, both about where these buildings go and how individual sites are designed.

Strategic location: infrastructure, resilience and water

The starting point has to be location. Too often, sites are selected on land value and availability rather than genuine suitability, which then drives piecemeal road widening, new grid connections and ad hoc infrastructure creep as each scheme is bolted on to the last. A more strategic approach would identify locations where transport and power infrastructure already has capacity, limiting the need for new roads and transmission routes to be carved through the countryside to serve individual developments.

Just as important is the resilience of the wider landscape. As these buildings increase in scale, often dwarfing anything historically built in rural or edge-of-settlement locations, their relationship with residential communities and sensitive landscapes becomes harder to manage. A single large shed can be screened; a cluster of them, each added incrementally, changes the character of an entire area.

Water resilience is now firmly part of this conversation too. Recent reporting has highlighted that the majority of data centres proposed in the UK are in areas already water stressed, or projected to become so in the coming decades, often the same parts of the country already facing pressure on supply for homes and agriculture. Water is not just a data centre issue either: it underpins the power generation these facilities depend on. Strategic site selection has to weigh water availability, current and future, alongside power and transport, rather than treating it as an afterthought once a site is already committed.

Site-level thinking: masterplanning, drainage and early landscape

Even where location is right, the way individual sites are planned matters just as much. Too many commercial and industrial areas evolve as a collection of unrelated plots, each designed to its own boundary with little reference to its neighbours. A masterplanned approach to these emerging "commercial and industrial districts" allows a coherent framework to be established from the outset, one that relates positively to the wider landscape rather than fighting against it.

Surface water drainage and landscape structure should be part of that early masterplanning, not retrofitted plot by plot. Establishing the green and blue infrastructure first, the drainage corridors, buffers and structural planting, gives a framework within which individual development parcels can then be defined, rather than the reverse.

Because these districts are typically built out in phases over many years, there is also real value in implementing landscape and planting early (despite the early capital spend and impact on cashflow), ahead of full build-out. Buffer zones, ecological corridors and visual screens planted at the outset have a decade or more to establish before the district reaches full capacity, rather than being an afterthought squeezed in once the last building is up.

A different kind of industrial landscape

Industrial and commercial development does not have to mean a collection of boxes arranged around roads. Approached strategically, at both the district and the site level, these developments can become clearly masterplanned places with genuinely multi-functional landscapes, delivering ecology, drainage, amenity, and visual screening or integration together. 

This is not simply theory, we have applied this thinking directly on a number of live industrial and commercial projects. On a future industrial site on the M1 corridor in Yorkshire, we reversed the conventional approach to the site plan, developing the biodiversity and drainage strategy up front rather than fitting it around a fixed layout of units, releasing a significant uplift in developable land for the client while still delivering a robust ecological and drainage framework. 

At an industrial site near Manchester Airport, where the challenge has been integrating a substantial commercial development into an established residential edge, the emphasis has been on the boundary interface itself, with planting design and edge treatment carefully considered to soften that transition.

Each of these projects shows what is possible when landscape thinking is brought in early and worked through collaboratively with the wider design team, not as a constraint on development, but as something that can unlock value, resolve site constraints, and improve how these places relate to their surroundings. 

As the pressure to build more warehousing and data centre capacity continues, that strategic thinking, applied early, is what will determine whether these landscapes become an asset to their surroundings or simply another layer of infrastructure imposed upon them.