What does Amazon investing £1bn mean for a county?

To the untrained eye, Amazon's newest fulfillment centre is a vast behemoth.

But behind the metal panels and glass windows lay four floors of warehouse with advanced technology enabling the convenience of next or even same-day delivery.

The massive site near junction 15 of the M1 in Northampton has a total internal footprint 2.2 million sq ft (204,387 sq m).

But why has the online retailer chosen to invest here - and what could it mean for the future?

On Wednesday, Amazon officially opened its new fulfilment centre in Northampton, known as STN6.

And as one project concluded, the online retailer was announcing plans for a second hub less than 20 miles (32km) away in Kettering.

The Northampton site, an Amazon Robotics Sortable (ARS) fulfilment centre, can store tens of millions of products and has been fitted with a range of new technology - some of which has not been used in the UK before.

The Kettering project is slated for completion in the autumn of this year and will provide a logistics hub where goods from suppliers are delivered before quickly being sent out again to carriers or customers.

The 900,000 sq ft (83,610 sqm) facility will handle about 20 million items a week.

Amazon said the Northampton and Kettering sites would cost £1bn to deliver and are part of its wider £40bn investment into the UK between 2025-27.

This has included a newly opened fulfilment centre in Hull and a £107m distribution centre in Peterborough, due to open this autumn, creating 1,400 jobs.

The short answer is a simple one: location and infrastructure.

The county's position in the centre of the country provides access to a massive consumer base.

The M1 and the A14 run through it, it is close to the M40 and M6 and has the Daventry International Rail Freight Terminal (DIRFT) and Northampton Gateway freight terminal too.

Clare Bottle, from the UK Warehousing Association, said Northamptonshire had a "really proud history of being central to trade and distribution across the centuries".

She said for the likes of Amazon, the county provided the ability to reach almost all of the UK within one HGV driving shift.

The Northampton and Kettering warehouses serve different purposes for the firm, but their close proximity enable it to fulfil customer orders more quickly - and reduce its own costs too.

Bottle said there was no doubt the investment was a "really good news story" for Northamptonshire.

She said it was not just about the benefits for Amazon, but the county itself.

"With those warehouses they'll be paying business rates, that's supporting the local economy," she said.

"Sometimes the story we hear about warehouses is a bit of negative one. I'd really like to put that right, today's warehousing jobs - especially with a big investor like Amazon - will mean really technically focused jobs.

"It can be a really good engine of social mobility. Not just entry level but also chances to develop and move on."

John Boumphrey, from Amazon UK, said that once fully operational, the new facilities in Northampton and Kettering would create about 4,000 jobs in total.

A thousand of those jobs are already up and running in Northampton, with another thousand to have been recruited by the end of the year. A further 2,000 jobs are to be generated by the Kettering facility.

However, it has also been a time of change for some of the company's long-serving staff.

Earlier this year, Amazon closed its first UK base, which opened in Bedfordshire in 1998.

The 500 employees at Marston Gate, near Brogborough, were given the opportunity to transfer to Northampton or another location.

Magda Ziavka, one of the affected workers, said it had been really difficult to leave the "family" of the Bedfordshire site behind, but "the feeling here [at Northampton] is also pretty good".

Mick Lancaster, from the GMB Union, said the human impact of closing the Bedfordshire site had been felt by the people once employed there.

"Many of our members have got young families and commitments in the local Bedford area," he said.

"Some of our members have relocated already, so coming up from Dunstable and Luton way the travel to Northampton was just too far out of their reach."

Boumphrey said the move had been made after "careful consideration" and was a symptom of evolving consumer demand.

"This [Northampton warehouse] is on a different scale. It's across four floors where we only had two there [Bedfordshire]," he said.

"It allows us to use the latest generation of robots and it's really efficient. It gives us the ability to deliver to our customers to get those products even faster."

He added: "We think really hard about what is the right footprint, what is the right set of buildings to have."

Bottle said the Covid pandemic had taught the logistics industry that "warehousing is absolutely essential to making sure that we've got enough of everything everywhere to be able to serve consumers".

At Northampton, some 1,600 robots are spread across the floors of the building.

They will allow Amazon to store, pack and ship hundreds of thousands of orders every week.

But Bottle said improving technology did not mean that humans would become obsolete in the process, despite a "trend" of automation and artificial intelligence impacting many job sectors.

She said: "The adoption of robotics means that the leadership jobs in warehouses are very skilled.

"You need to lead teams of people and manage some quite technical equipment."

For all the progress and benefits that the facilites like Amazon's new centre in Northampton bring, there remains resistance from locals.

A campaign group staged a protest in April against a separate development off the A14 near Kettering.

It was only the latest such example of opposition, with themes from campaigners often centred on the appearance of the structures, their impact on local roads and, in some cases, proximity to residential areas.

Bottle, who also chairs the Northamptonshire Logistics Industry Forum, said there was a balance to strike.

She said: "We need to think carefully about how we use land. There are lots of questions about planning permission and we need more investment in the planning process.

"But if we do that really well, we can find the happy medium where we're making the best use of the land available to us on this beautiful island of Britain.

"And, at the same time, attracting that inward investment from big firms like Amazon and creating fabulous jobs."

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