Arriv­ing at the Port of Felixstowe

A few weeks ago, I went in search of fish at Felix­stowe (on the Suf­folk coast, UK), took a wrong turn and found myself try­ing to drive into the Port. In the few minutes it took to ask for dir­ec­tions at the secur­ity gate (where the men were very friendly and help­ful), sev­eral lor­ries came and went, appar­ently dis­ap­pear­ing into the unend­ing stretch of the Port ahead of me. What goes on in all that space? I wondered, so a couple of weeks later, my friend and I joined the ‘ship-spotters’ at the Land­guard Ter­minal view­ing area. I had no idea what a pleas­ure that could be! You can watch the ships arrive into port (with the help of a mar­ine pilot and tugs), ‘park’ (a pro­cess which looks espe­cially tricky), and after a few hours, leave again with a dif­fer­ent cargo (or with empty boxes given the dis­crep­ancy between imports and exports in the UK). It’s hard to grasp the sheer expanse of the site from any vant­age point on the ground – at close to 200 hec­tares, it’s the size of about 185 foot­ball pitches. Still, after driv­ing along the peri­meter fence for about 10 minutes and see­ing little other than con­tain­ers (and not a single per­son!), I did get a sense of this space of the phys­ical redis­tri­bu­tion of goods in ‘a flow of dispersion-concentration-dispersion’ (Mark Har­vey et al, 2002: 202–5).

It’s worth giv­ing some details about the Port itself to begin to under­stand its sig­ni­fic­ance, loc­ally and glob­ally. Privately owned by the Hutchison Port Hold­ings Group, accord­ing to the Port of Felix­stowe web­site, Felix­stowe is the largest and busiest con­tainer port in the UK, amongst the largest in Europe, and ranked 33 by con­tainer traffic in the World Port Rank­ing (2008). In one year, it handles over 3 mil­lion TEUs (Twenty-foot Equi­val­ent Units – con­tain­ers are either 20 or 40 feet long), 4000 ships, and over 40% of the UK’s import and export trade. It’s hard to over­state the impact of con­tain­er­isa­tion which trans­formed cargo ship­ping in the second half of the 20th Cen­tury (Lev­in­son, 2006). Felix­stowe, with its offer of deep water next to the quay (up to 15m main­tained by dredging) and its loc­a­tion close to the open sea, was just right for a con­tainer ter­minal (built in 1966). It usurped Liv­er­pool, Lon­don and other urban ports in the UK, as those sites were less con­veni­ent and couldn’t handle the size of these new ships. (See Ports of Call for memor­ies of the com­munit­ies sur­round­ing the Royal Docks in London.)

Trans­port connections

The min­imal cost of trans­port­ing goods in con­tain­ers means that it’s not only cheaper to pro­duce a flat-screen TV in China, it’s cheaper to move it half way around the world to the UK coast than to deliver it from South to North within Bri­tain for example (BBC4, 2010). The spa­tial arrange­ments of these com­plex global dis­tri­bu­tion net­works reflect the cur­rent logic of com­mod­ity pro­duc­tion and con­sump­tion where dis­tance is no obstacle since space is over­come by time (David Har­vey, 1992). The suc­cess of keep­ing things mov­ing also relies on a broader infra­struc­ture of rail and road and at Felix­stowe, some rail lines are owned by the Port con­nect­ing with those of other Train Oper­at­ing Com­pan­ies in order that boxes can be dir­ectly loaded onto trucks or trains. So in addi­tion to ship­ping lines, the whole pro­cess requires rails com­pan­ies, for­ward­ing and line agents, and logist­ics and dis­tri­bu­tion companies.

The his­tory of con­tain­er­isa­tion is how­ever also a his­tory of the demise of the dock­worker, a pain­ful trans­ition whereby metal boxes and soft­ware replaced the dock­ers’ hook and their phys­ical labour. As Marc Lev­in­son puts it,

‘The con­tainer made ship­ping cheap, and by doing so changed the shape of the world eco­nomy. The armies of will-paid, ill-treated work­ers who once made their liv­ings load­ing and unload­ing ships in every port are no more, their tight-knit water­front com­munit­ies now just memor­ies.’ (2006: 2)

In BBC4’s ‘The Box that Changed Bri­tain’ which aired earlier this month, we see a single per­son over­see­ing a computer-allocated pro­cess of unload­ing and reload­ing by crane, doing what tens of thou­sands of men (and it is all men in these stor­ies) pre­vi­ously did. This dra­matic reduc­tion of labour is also mirrored by the hand­ful of men who now work on the massive con­tainer ships themselves.

Another rep­res­ent­a­tion of con­tem­por­ary dock work can be seen in The Wire. Mov­ing freight in con­tain­ers that gen­er­ally don’t get opened is a widely recog­nised oppor­tun­ity for the informal eco­nomy – both in The Wire and in the real life pres­ence of the UK Bor­der Agency at Felix­stowe with its des­ig­nated spaces to exam­ine the con­tents of the con­tain­ers. The boxes are all uniquely coded, but at the same time, anonymised and opaque. In the police invest­ig­a­tion into irreg­u­lar prac­tices in Bal­timore in the second series of The Wire, it is the com­puter rep­res­ent­a­tion of their move­ment in space that finally reveals the ‘dis­ap­pear­ance’ of boxes and their goods. Albeit a fic­tion­al­ised depic­tion, it presents the under­stand­ing and prac­tice of the work of man­aging the phys­ical dis­tri­bu­tion of goods to the viewer as medi­ated by how it’s depic­ted on the com­puter screen.

Wait­ing containers

The cur­rent Port of Felix­stowe is quite a setup, with around 40 ship­ping lines oper­at­ing from the site. Open for busi­ness 24 hours a day, (almost) every day (see the sail­ing sched­ule here), there is a work­force of close to 3000. The range of what they do is strik­ing: there’s lots of engin­eer­ing of course, plus sys­tems devel­op­ment and plan­ning, rail oper­a­tions, yard con­trol and steve­doring. And the Port has its own ded­ic­ated police, fire and ambu­lance ser­vices. On the Port web­site (from which this inform­a­tion is taken), the list of ‘ancil­lary ser­vices’ also indic­ates the vari­ety of asso­ci­ated work activ­it­ies which wouldn’t hap­pen without it – chauf­feurs, mar­ine sur­vey­ors and ship repairs, fin­an­cial ser­vices, IT, and many more, plus of course all the domestic labour that must remain flex­ible to sup­port a 24 hour oper­a­tion. And the primary activ­ity they are all there to carry out or sup­port is to move things around. That’s really the thing that struck me most; the enorm­ous amount of stuff there is in this ‘hold­ing space’ — and one that many com­mer­cial organ­isa­tions effect­ively use as a de facto mobile stor­age facil­ity — that marks the land­scape with its presence.

Ref­er­ences
1. BBC4 ‘The Box that Changed Bri­tain’, 9 May 2010: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00scpzn.
2. Har­vey, D. (1992) The Lim­its to Cap­ital, Basil Black­well (Oxford) and Uni­ver­sity of Chicago.
3. Har­vey, M., S. Quil­ley and H. Beynon (2002) Explor­ing the Tomato, Trans­form­a­tions of Nature, Soci­ety and Eco­nomy, Edward Elgar.
4. Lev­in­son, M. (2006) The Box: How the ship­ping con­tainer made the world smal­ler and the world eco­nomy big­ger, Prin­ceton Uni­ver­sity Press.