Giant Car Park

Following on from my blog yesterday on falling road traffic in the UK, there was also an article in The Times yesterday looking at the every expanding car park that is emerging at Southampton docks!

More than 12,000 new cars are parked in rows at the dock covering acres of land. Most of them are Hondas being stored until exports pick up. There are also Range Rovers, Land Rovers, Jaguars, Mini Coopers and BMWs stored in “multideck” car parks. The Hondas represent two weeks of output from the company’s factory in Swindon, which is on a four month shutdown.

The local economy in Southampton depends upon the three Cs- cars, containers and cruises. It is home to Britain’s second largest container terminal as well as the British fleet of P & O and Cunard. Container business was down 10% in 2008.

The big cruise ships on currently out on their round-the-world voyages and will not be returning for a month or two. Their current docking berths are occupied by cargo ships, each paying £5000 a week for mooring.

Before the credit crunch Southampton was handling 42 million tonnes of cargo a year, including one million containers at the recently renamed Dubai World Port Terminal. Nearly all imports come from the Far East. The collapse of major importers such as Woolworths has been “pretty disastrous”.

Recently arrived and sitting on the dockside is one of the 27 Olympic trains being imported from Hong Kong for London 2012. The flow of manufactued products is now nearly all one way highlighting yet further the decline of UK manufacturing.

For full article click here.