SOME 25 miles east of London, on the site of a former oil refinery, the biggest infrastructure project most people have never heard of is under way. Giant earthmoving machines level mounds of sand and mud dredged from the River Thames. Reinforced concrete pillars as tall as Nelson's Column are sunk at the rate of one a day. They will support the quay and the cranes that will unload containers at the London Gateway port. The first three of six berths will open in December 2013.

In the 1920s London was the world's biggest port, with ships unloading straight into dockside warehouses in the East End. Bigger ships and the rise of shipping containers knocked it off its perch in the 1960s, and the dockers' unions almost finished it off. London has nearby Tilbury, a smallish port that concentrates on food. But London Gateway will return the capital to entrepôt status. Capable of handling 3.5m containers a year from the biggest ships, the port will be as large as Felixstowe, currently Britain's biggest port, and twice the size of Southampton, the next largest.

The port's developer is DP World, the third-biggest ports company in the world and owned by the emirate of Dubai. It is also building one of Europe's largest logistics parks next to the docks. This will have a new double rail link up to the warehouse doors, for those companies that wish to build their own sidings, and an upgraded road link to the M25. The developer claims London Gateway will do more than provide new port capacity to satisfy Britain's appetite for imports; it will change the way goods move from ship to shop.

Today most imported consumer goods from East Asia enter Britain in containers through Felixstowe or Southampton and travel on lorries along the A14 trunk road or the north-south A34 to a cluster of warehouses around Leicester and Ashby-de-la-Zouch. Streams of articulated lorries then ferry containers—some empty, others filled with waste paper and assorted rubbish—back to the ports for shipping to China. At the new port, containers can be transferred straight to warehouses, with the cargo leaving in smaller loads going directly to the south-east's shops. London Gateway claims this will save millions of miles of lorry journeys, equivalent to taking 2,000 vehicles a day off Britain's roads.