We have been portcentric all along — just not in name

THERE is something in this portcentric logistics stuff. Not least of which is the fact that there is nothing new about it.

At the recent conference in Birmingham on the topic — organised by London firm Navigate Events, which gets the obligatory honourable mention for first, providing a free press pass; and second, lending me a laptop after the business centre in the Crowne Plaza hotel demonstrated its spectacular ineptitude in failing to recover the password for its own computers — more than one speaker showed a slide of some portcentric operations stretching back a century or more.

The ever-affable Murray Gibson from Felixstowe produced a picture from 1934 of the Stothert & Pitt mechanical porter that used to operate at London’s Broad Street station; while Stephen Carr from Peel Ports had unearthed an old plan of the Bridgewater Docks at Runcorn from 1894, no less, which were rail connected and showed how the canny — and Liverpool-hating — merchants of Manchester had developed a portcentric logistics park to load up its exports on their way out to the far corners of the Empire.

As a side note, I do have a problem with the term itself: saying it and writing it — ‘portcentric’ — sounds daft to my ears and makes my computer fly into a spasm of squiggly red underlines. Is it one word or two? If it is two, is it hyphenated or separated?

Whatever. The shipping business is more interested in whether it is effective or not, although I do wonder whether shipping lines — as distinct from the wider transport and logistics sector — really care two hoots whether the de-stuffing of containers happens near a port or not. Carriers simply service cargo flows. They go to the ports their customers want them to go to.

This has not been lost on some the more far-sighted ports, which have concentrated their marketing efforts on attracting shippers rather than shipping lines. The most obvious example is Savannah in the US, which has built up serious cargo volumes by offering major shippers vast tracts of road and rail connected land to build massive regional distribution centres. In other words, Georgia Ports Authority offered players such as Wal-Mart and Target a portcentric solution, with Asian import cargo for their stores in the eastern and southern US arriving on all-water services via the Panama Canal, which the retailers have employed as an alternative to that same cargo arriving through west coast ports and being railed to warehouses in the centre of the country.

That is the model that ports in the UK are ultimately apeing, despite the photographic evidence that portcentric logistics has been present here for over a century; only not in name.