DPD publishes details and more video of its £150m Hinckley Park hub project

DPD has broadcast construction footage of its new £150m hub in Hinckley, Leicestershire, which it said will be the largest domestic parcel hub in Europe when operational in 2022.

Aerial footage shared on a video today (19 June) shows the footprint of the 276,454sq ft main hub building and the infrastructure work that is taking place on the rest of the 39-acre site.

The location will be DPD’s fifth hub in the UK and is near to junction 1 of the M69. It forms part of the 82-acre Hinckley Park development that is being delivered by IM Properties.

It is located 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, Leicestershire in 2015.

Contractor Winvic Construction 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.

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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 502m long and 40m wide.

DPD has claimed that it will be its most secure and technologically advanced hub, fitted out with fully automated sortation technology, optical character recognition software to automatically scan address information, more than 300 security cameras and 3,000-plus metres of conveyor.

When fully operational, the hub will be able to sort 72,000 parcels per hour.

DPD CEO Dwain McDonald said: "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.”

He added that over the past seven years, DPD had invested in more than 30 purpose-built regional depots and larger DCs around the UK.