A new film has delivered an exclusive look at the construction work on Europe's largest domestic parcel hub in Leicestershire.

The £150 million DPD facility is being delivered in Hinckley, with a 276,454 sq ft main hub building and infrastructure work taking place on the rest of the 39 acre site.

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


Contractor Winvic Construction Ltd commenced building work in January 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.

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."

The film, which shows the hub taking shape, is available below.