The Tiny Port That Beat London and Liverpool

Felixstowe container port: in the 1960s, almost nobody in Britain had heard of this small Suffolk port. By the 1990s, Felixstowe had overtaken London and Liverpool to become Britain's busiest container port. This documentary tells the story of one of the most remarkable underdog transformations in modern British industrial history. While London's ancient docks struggled to adapt to the container shipping revolution and thousands of dockers lost their livelihoods, a small, privately owned port on the Suffolk coast made an early, decisive bet on the shipping container, years before its larger, more established rivals were even willing to try. You'll follow Felixstowe port from its origins as a modest seaside harbour with almost no national significance, through the construction of Britain's earliest dedicated container berths, through decades of relentless expansion that never quite kept pace with demand, to the moment Felixstowe officially overtook London and Liverpool as Britain's number one container port. Along the way, you'll see how Felixstowe's rise created an entirely new kind of trucking route: fixed container haulage runs from the Suffolk coast straight into the industrial heart of England, a haulage pattern that barely existed before Felixstowe and one that reshaped Britain's container shipping and freight geography within a single working lifetime. #BritishLorries Felixstowe #ContainerShipping