DPD has released aerial footage showing that work is well underway on the company’s £150m (US$188m) state-of-the-art parcel hub in Hinkley, Leicestershire.
The 276,000ft² (25,600m²) hub will be DPD’s fifth in the UK and the largest domestic parcel hub in Europe. It will be located close to J1 of the M69, as part of the 82-acre Hinckley Park development, being delivered by IM Properties. The new facility will be just two miles from two other key DPD sites in the area: Hub 4 and the firm’s International Gateway, both of which opened in Sketchley in 2015.
Contractors Winvic Construction commenced building work in January 2019 and the main build should be completed by February 2020. The engineering fit-out will then run until December 2021 with the facility operational in 2022. On an average day, there will be around 200 construction workers on-site during the build.
The Hub 5 site is the size of 22 football pitches and the main hub building is 1,656ft (502m) long and 131ft (40m) wide. It will be DPD’s most secure and technologically advanced hub, fitted out with the very latest fully automated sortation technology, optical character recognition software to automatically scan address information, over 300 security cameras and more than 9,842ft (3,000m) of conveyor. When fully operational, the giant hub will be able to sort 72,000 parcels per hour.
Dwain McDonald, DPD’s CEO, commented, “It is fantastic to see our fifth hub starting to take shape. Hinckley is already a strategically key location for us but having two giant hubs there in future, separate from our West Midlands hubs, gives us a huge amount of operational flexibility to cope with major volume peaks or traffic issues on the network.
“When Hub 5 opens we will have three of the largest fully automated parcel hubs in Europe and the overnight sorting capacity to support our retail customers for many years to come. In the last seven years we’ve also invested in over 30 purpose-built regional depots and larger distribution centers around the country to ensure that we have the best and most efficient network infrastructure in the industry.”
The new film, which clearly shows the foundations of the new hub and the structure beginning to take shape, can be viewed here.