A deep-sea container port and logistics park on the Thames at Thurrock, Essex, built on the site of the old Shell Haven oil refinery.
DP World London Gateway is a container port and a huge logistics park on the north bank of the River Thames at Thurrock in Essex, about 30 miles east of central London. A container port is where goods packed into large steel boxes are moved between ships and the road and rail networks. London Gateway can handle some of the largest container ships in the world and uses semi-automated equipment, including 78 automated stacking cranes in the yard. Next to the port is a logistics park, where companies store, sort and send out goods. The site was previously the Shell Haven oil refinery, which closed in 1999.
The port opened on 6 November 2013, when the ship MOL Caledon arrived carrying fruit and wine from South Africa. Its annual capacity is 3.5 million containers (measured in TEU, the standard container size), and Wikipedia reports it had 16 quay cranes with plans for 24 and six berths. The logistics park has been described by the company as the UK's biggest of its kind. In March 2025 Thurrock Council approved a new 10-year planning order for it, which lets new buildings receive final approval within 28 days. We found no formal mission statement for the port, so we have not invented one.
London Gateway is in Thurrock, on the Essex side of the Thames, and is part of the wider Port of London. It sits inside the Thames Freeport, which was declared in 2021. The port has its own rail terminal with daily trains to the West Coast Main Line, and the first UK-to-China rail freight service left from it in April 2017. Road access is by the A13 to the M25. Customers on the logistics park include Lidl, UPS, which opened a parcel sorting hub there in 2018, and, according to the company, the park's first two manufacturing tenants, Destiny Entertainments and Ranson, who moved in at the start of 2025. CMA CGM also opened a chilled and frozen Chill Hub on the site in 2019.
On people, the company says the earlier planning order created 1,500 permanent jobs on the site and that the new one should support hundreds more. Alan Holland, chief executive of the logistics park, has described it as a world-class logistics and technology hub and said it is well placed to keep growing. Wikipedia notes an employee bus service that runs from Chafford Hundred, Grays and Stanford-le-Hope, a reminder that many jobs here are for people living nearby. We did not find detail on workplace culture, so we have not guessed.
The work at a site like this covers more than crane driving. It includes port operations and control-room staff, engineers and technicians who maintain the cranes and automated systems, safety and security teams, rail and haulage planners, customs and documentation staff, and property, commercial, finance and human resources teams for the logistics park. If you are interested in technology, automation, how goods reach shops and homes, or large engineering projects, this is a place where all of them meet.
Website: www.dpworld.com/london-gateway
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