The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part IV: Tactical Filters
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Patrick Keiller
27.4 | Robinson in Space. Sign to Midpoint distribution park, near Middlewich,
Cheshire. Tesco has a 375,000 ft 2 distribution center at Midpoint, built in 1993. It
has 33,000 pallet positions and a holding capacity of 43 million cases, or nine days’
stock for 120 stores. Each store receives between one and four deliveries per day.
overtime, and this led to the picket line that the MDHC workers refused to
cross. Liverpool dockers were supported by secondary actions in New York
and elsewhere, so that the giant U.S. container line ACL threatened to move
its ships from Liverpool unless the lockout was ended. In other countries,
even employers were shocked by the MDHC’s unrestrained determination
to be rid of most of their last few dockers. In July 1996, ACL carried out its
threat and moved its ships to Thamesport, an independently owned container
terminal within the MDHC-owned Medway Ports in Kent (ACL
later returned to Liverpool). Medway Ports, which had been privatized in
1989 as a management-employee buyout, was bought by the MDHC in
1993 in a transaction that made Medway’s former chief executive a multimillionaire.
Medway had previously sacked 300 of its dockers for refusing to
accept new contracts. On dismissal, the dockers were obliged to surrender
their shares in the company at a valuation of £2.50 per share, shortly before
MDHC bought them for £37.25 each.
The main port of the Medway is Sheerness, which is the largest vehicle
handling port in the United Kingdom, with imports by Volkswagen-
Audi, two-way traffic by Peugeot-Citroën, and exports from General
Motors’ U.K. plants, among others. Like other modern U.K. ports, it is a
somewhat out-of-the-way place. Opposite the dock gates is the plant of Co-