In an unlikely start, Queen Victoria’s flannel knickers heralded our celebration of warehousing, writes UKWA CEO, Clare Bottle. To mark 2024 The Year of Warehousing I will be visiting eighty (yes 80!) warehouses this year. Before I could embark on such an ambitious odyssey, I decided to pay my respects at the most historic and iconic warehouse building of them all: the Royal Welsh Warehouse.
Wales has always been a haven for sheep. This kind of farming may have been introduced by the Romans and even today it remains a mainstay of the principality’s economy. No surprise then, that Welsh woollen products were favoured by royalty, none more so than the ultra-soft flannel undergarments of our nineteenth century sovereign.
Starting out as an apprentice tailor in the 1850s, Welsh entrepreneur Pryce Pryce-Jones went on to build a global empire from the modest base of Newtown in mid-Wales. Not only did he sell flannel clothing, along with cloaks, corsets and net curtains but the enterprising business man invented the sleeping bag too! And in 1879 he opened a purpose-built warehouse, right next to the railway station. A printing press was soon installed and thus the first ever mail order catalogues in the world were produced. It was an inspired development which paved the way for the e-commerce revolution which continues to shape modern retail markets.
The warehouse of 150 years ago doubled as a showroom, so its exterior was elaborate: brick-built with more than one grand entrance. There were various different staircases, presumably not all public, and of course the forklift truck was not invented until 1917, so this early warehouse’s layout was more like the design of the nearby Cambrian Mills, with storage over five floors linked by a sophisticated system of goods lifts. Large windows let in sufficient natural light to carry out quality checks and huge internal doors acted as firebreaks; the Cambrian Mills burnt down in 1912, but the Royal Welsh Warehouse is still standing today.
Nevertheless, the building has seen better days. The roof is leaking and despite the cheerful presence of a few local business tenants, many of the cavernous storage rooms lie vacant and unloved. What a stark contrast to the brand new Visku warehouse built by Prologis in Wellingborough. My tour of their site is officially the first of my 80 visits. Dubbed the Pallet Hotel, this 335,000 sq. ft state-of-the-art development will offer the ultimate in storage flexibility. Chief Executive Andy Kaye describes Visku’s purpose as ‘customer centric’ and in that at least, he shares the same vision as Pryce Pryce-Jones. Warehousing extends across the whole country, serves all our diverse supply chains and even spans different eras, but if there is to be a common feature to all 80 of my visits for 2024 The Year of Warehousing, I suspect it will be the focus that warehouse operations have always put on delivering great customer service .
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