One night, 400,000 parcels

At ten at night every lamp is burning in the parcel hub behind the port. It is the third day of the autumn shopping festival, and the sorting hall, the size of two football pitches, is starting its busiest night shift of the year: between 8 pm and 6 am about 400,000 parcels will be scanned, sorted and loaded, more than twice the usual number.

At the feed station of line 3, a sorter in an orange reflective vest squares each carton with her left hand and scans it with her right before it slides on to the belt behind her. Two years into the job, she is on her second festival. "The peak runs from eleven to two," she says. "More than 600 parcels an hour pass through my hands, and my eyes have to stay on the waybill."

A parcel's night

The night-shift foreman has worked here for eight years. The biggest change this year, he says, is in how people are used. A month before the festival the hub hired 120 temporary workers and trained them together; two new automatic lines have lifted capacity to 50,000 parcels an hour, moving experienced staff from lifting to the feed stations and the problem parcels. "However fast the machines run, a damaged box or an unreadable address still needs a person."

Fresh food makes up nearly a fifth of this year's orders. Seafood from the eastern lake district and citrus from the northern hills travel on a cold-chain line with its own dock, and spend no more than 90 minutes between arrival and loading.

The city's postal regulator expects more than 12 million parcels in festival week, 18 per cent up on last year. Depots are opening longer so that nothing piles up at the far end, and some neighbourhood pick-up points stay open until 10 pm. The hub asks customers to check the outer packaging on receipt and to hand sound cartons back to the pick-up point for reuse.

At 5.40 am the last box van leaves the yard. The foreman signs the handover book and looks up at the empty belt. "Nothing left over tonight. Sleep, then we do it again this evening."