Ships full of boxes.
Watching ships out of my window.
I can see them from my bedroom window. Out in the Thames heading west for port; or east out to the North Sea and on to destinations around the world. Dwarfing the local Leigh-on-Sea fishing boats, these giant ships are piled high with steel boxes.
There is little beauty in the modern day container ship, but still, they look majestic as they sweep up the estuary, their metal cargo glinting in the sun. It’s fascinating to glimpse this manifestation of global trade from my own window. As I look out to the containers — resembling coloured Lego bricks in the distance — I wonder where they’ve come from and what’s in them.
The introduction of the shipping container changed global trade. It standardised much of the shipping industry. I have no idea what’s in the containers I see travelling up the Thames, but they probably contain televisions, smart phones, computers, car parts, toys, kitchen appliances and food. Apparently a single 20-foot container can hold 10,000 iPads.
Of course it is not the box itself that makes the container so important, as Marc Levinson observes in his book ‘The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger’:
“A soulless aluminium or steel box held together with welds and rivets, with a wooden floor and two enormous doors at one end: the standard container has all the romance of a tin can. The value of this utilitarian object lies not in what it is, but in how it is used.”
The author Rose George decided to explore this hidden world of container shipping. In her (rather good) book ‘Deep Sea and Foreign Going: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Brings You 90% of Everything,’ she boards a container ship for a five week voyage from Felixstowe to Singapore. It’s a fascinating insight into the life of the 21st century merchant seaman, with tales of piracy and solitude along the way. Rose also explores the economics of container shipping, revealing that it is cheaper to send Scottish cod 10,000 miles to China to be filleted and then sent back to the UK than have it done locally in Scotland.
At Christmas I received a set of Jamie Oliver branded olive oils. Produced by a Dutch company, these oils are from Italy. Then I read the small print: “bottled and packaged in China”. I live in Europe but it makes economic sense for a Dutch company to ship oil from Italy to China in order for it to be bottled and packaged. That sad fact is only made possible by containerisation.
Now ships are getting bigger. Maersk has been building the world’s largest ship. Four-hundred metres long, 59 metres wide and 73 metres high, this new breed of ship carries 18,000 containers. Super ports are being built to accommodate these giants, such as my nearest port DP World London Gateway that opened last year.
My father started his working life on Blue Star Line ships in 1955. He left the merchant navy seven years later in 1962, around the time containerisation started. In stark contrast to his experience fifty years ago, these super ports are highly automated with few people employed. A huge container ship can be unloaded in twenty four hours.
Out in the Thames estuary, dredgers have been creating deeper channels to accommodate these bigger ships, the dredging operation affecting the ecosystem of the estuary, and in turn the livelihood of my hometown’s fishermen. But still, for all the freight they carry, container ships are more eco-friendly than road or air freight. The Mayor of London wants to build a multi-billion pound new airport for London out in the estuary — I’d rather look out of my window and see ships than a massive maritime building site.
So why the fascination? It’s more than simply a boy’s love of trucks, ‘planes and boats. I’m moved to write about it because I see this industry happening in front of my eyes, these cargo ships full of mystery.
Seeing those ships out of my window makes me feel connected, giving me a real sense of being part of a bigger world. Of course I’d rather fewer sea miles were involved in the production of everyday goods, I’d rather our appetite for shiny Apple products didn’t fill so many containers on docksides in China. Because I care about where products are made, I care about supporting the small independent trader over the big global brand. But still, container shipping is here to stay. Living here by the Thames estuary I prefer to see it being used as a transportation route, than see it free of shipping. As the writer Rachel Lichtenstein reminds us in her essay ‘Liquid History’, goods from around the world have arrived in Europe via the Thames from as far back as Roman times.
Seeing those ships out of my window also makes me wonder, not just about the products, but also about the stories being transported in these metal boxes. Stories of the workers who made the goods in their Chinese factories, of the crews who transport them, of the stormy seas that carried them, and of the European consumers who will soon handle them. To me the container is a dot-connector, not only transiting goods from one continent to another, but connecting different people, trades, industries and cultures in between. And that’s why I like to look out of the window…
Ian Sanders lives by the estuary in Leigh-on-Sea.
