Winvic underway with largest parcel hub in Europe

Winvic Construction Limited is currently well underway with a scheme, commissioned by IM Properties, to produce the largest domestic parcel hub in Europe for DPD in Hinckley, Leicestershire, at a cost of approximately £150M.

The new state-of-the-art hub will be the fifth constructed for DPD in the UK and will take up around 39 acres of the 82 acres Hinckley Park development new junction one of the M69, the main hub building and surrounding infrastructure itself occupying a space of exactly 276,454sq ft.

The Hub 5, as it will be referred to upon completion, site is roughly the size of 22 football pitches and the main hub building will be 502 metres long by 40 metres wide, with 200 construction workers currently operating the site, on average, during every working day.

Construction began back in January 2019 with completion of the main build scheduled for February 2020, although a subsequent engineering fit-out will continue to take place until December 2021, meaning that the facility will not be fully operational until 2022.

Hub 5, upon completion, will be DPD’s most secure and technologically advanced hub to date, featuring: the latest, fully automated, sortation technology, an optical character recognition software to automatically scan address information, more than 300 security cameras, and over 3,000 metres if conveyor, all of which will aid in the sorting of around 72,000 parcels per hour.

DPD’s CEO, Dwain McDonald stated: “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.

“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.”

Hub 5 will be just more than two miles away from DPD’s two other site in Sketchley, Hub 4 and the firm’s international gateway, both of which opened back in 2015.

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