The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Port Statistics
27.3 | Robinson in Space. Maintainer depot and Truckworld, West Thurrock, Essex,
near the Dartford Bridge and Tunnel, the M25 crossing.
ous on summer evenings, when busy trunk roads on which parking is permitted
become truck dormitories: south of Derby, an eighteen-mile stretch
of the A42 lined with lay-bys that connects the M42 with the M1, is one of
these; the nine-mile stretch of the A34 between Oxford and the M40 is another.
Many of these trucks are bound for the enormous warehouses of
inland distribution estates near motorway junctions—Wakefield 41, for
example, at junction 41 of the M1, next to its junction with the M62. The
road haulage—or logistics—industry does not typically base its depots in
port cities, though it is intimately linked to them: the road construction
battlefields of Twyford Down and Newbury were the last obstacles to rapid
road access to the port of Southampton from London (by the M3) and from
the Midlands and the North (by the M40 to the A34). The relative insubstantiality
of industrial development in the modern landscape seems to be
accompanied by very high levels of energy consumption.
Despite having shed the majority of its dockers, the Liverpool port
employer’s attitude to its remaining workforce is extremely aggressive. In
September 1995, two weeks after telling Lloyd’s List that it had the most
productive workforce in Europe, 10 the MDHC sacked 329 of its 500 remaining
dockers after they refused to cross a picket line. Five employees of
a contract labor firm had been sacked in a dispute over payment periods for