DPD’s 276,454 sq ft £150 million parcel hub in Hinckley, Leicestershire which is set to be the largest domestic parcel hub in Europe is on target for 2022 completion.
Winvic Construction started on building work in January 2019 and the building should be complete by February 2020. The engineering fit-out will then run until December 2021 with the facility operational in 2022.
The main hub building is 502 metres long and 40 metres wide. It will be DPD’s most secure and technologically advanced hub, featuring fully automated sortation technology, optical character recognition software to automatically scan address information, over 300 security cameras and over 3,000 metres of conveyor.
When fully operational, the hub will have the capacity to sort 72,000 parcels per hour.
“It is fantastic to see our fifth hub starting to take shape,” said DPD chief executive Dwain McDonald. “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.”
He added: “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.”
