DPD’s fifth UK hub starting to take shape
Work on DPD’s new £150 million state-of-the-art parcel hub in Hinckley, Leicestershire is well underway.
Aerial footage shows the giant footprint of the 276,454 sq ft main hub building and infrastructure work taking place on the rest of the 39 acre site.
The new 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 2 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 Ltd commenced building work in January of this year and the main build should be complete 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 502 metres long and 40 metres wide. It will be DPD’s most secure and technologically advanced hub, fitted out with the very latest fully automated sortation technology, the optical character recognition software to automatically scan address information, over 300 security cameras and more than 3,000 metres 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 centres around the country to ensure that we have the best and most efficient network infrastructure in the industry.”
