Qualla: London Gateway

London Gateway: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit S J Dowden, CC BY-SA 2.0. The cranes are taller than the London Eye. They came across the world on ships - 1,848-tonne quayside machines built in Shanghai, with booms 138 metres high - and they sit now on the north shore of the Thames, lifting boxes off vessels four football fields long. Until 1999 this same stretch of riverbank was Shell Haven, one of the largest oil refineries in Britain. Where the storage tanks once stood, 16 quay cranes wait for ships that carry as much cargo as the entire Royal Navy of Nelson's day.

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Image: S J Dowden | CC BY-SA 2.0

London Gateway: From Shell Haven to Container Port

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Christine Matthews, CC BY-SA 2.0. The land has 1,500 acres of industrial history. Shell first opened a refinery here in 1916. For most of the twentieth century, this corner of Thurrock was where crude oil arrived from Persia and Venezuela and the North Sea, was cracked into petrol and diesel, and was distributed ...

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Image: Christine Matthews | CC BY-SA 2.0

London Gateway: Dredging an Ocean Lane

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Niels Johannes, CC BY-SA 4.0. Before any cranes could land, contractors had to make the river deep enough. The first stage of construction was a £400 million dredging and reclamation programme led by Laing O'Rourke and Dredging International, scraping a 17-metre channel up the shifting sands of the outer Tham...

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Image: Niels Johannes | CC BY-SA 4.0

London Gateway: Robots on the Quayside

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Dixon, CC BY-SA 2.0. The yard behind the quay is a strange landscape. Containers are stacked, retrieved and shuffled by 78 automated cranes - 39 working the land side, 39 the ship side - that run on rails between rows without any operator on board. Software from Kalmar and Cargotec choreographs the m...

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Image: David Dixon | CC BY-SA 2.0

London Gateway: The Breakthrough Year

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nick Smith, CC BY-SA 2.0. For three years after opening, London Gateway struggled. The big shipping alliances had committed slots at older ports and saw no reason to move. Then in March 2017, THE Alliance - a consortium of Hapag-Lloyd, NYK Line, K-Line, Mitsui-OSK and Yang Ming - announced it would use Lo...

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Image: Nick Smith | CC BY-SA 2.0

London Gateway: The Future on the Estuary

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alexrk2, CC BY-SA 3.0. The port currently runs three deep-water berths. The plan is for six, with 24 quay cranes and 2,700 metres of quayside, giving an annual capacity of 3.5 million containers when fully built out. In 2021 it handled 1.8 million. The development order over the logistics park is the l...

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Image: Alexrk2 | CC BY-SA 3.0