Work to begin on huge 500,000 sq ft logistics facility at warehouse park near Isham

Work will begin on a huge 500,000 sq ft logistics facility at a warehouse park near Isham this month.

Tritax Symmetry has announced it is speculatively building the unit – which means it does not yet have a tenant lined up – at Symmetry Park Kettering.

The facility, which will be called ‘Kettering 500’, will be a cross-dock site. Cross-docking involves delivering products from a manufacturing plant directly to customers with little or no material handling in between, reducing the need to store the products in the warehouse.

Developers hope it will be completed by April 2024.

Jonathan Wallis, development director and head of Tritax Symmetry’s Northampton office, said: “Our decision to speculatively develop Kettering 500 is a direct response to extensive research into the occupational market which highlighted a supply vs demand imbalance in the 500,000 sq ft size bracket. Kettering 500 will showcase a best-in-class institutional specification, together with Tritax Symmetry’s own high design and sustainability standards.

“Symmetry Park Kettering represents a new era of logistics development, with wellbeing, sustainability and power security playing a fundamental role in the design. It is this customer and employee-based approach that has helped us attract multi-national organisations whose ESG values very much mirror our own and give us the confidence to commit to further speculative development.”

When plans for Symmetry Park were first announced Isham residents, who have fought for a bypass for decades, campaigned against them and said they would cause even more traffic misery.

The now-defunct Kettering Borough Council initially agreed with them and refused the bid, only to back down when an appeal was launched because they felt they had no chance of defending their decision.

In 2019 protesters lined the A509 to rally against a second controversial application – largely unchanged from the first – and reacted with fury when the council’s planning committee approved it.

A section of the A509 between the warehouse park and the A14 has since been dualled and a new roundabout has been installed as part of the development

Earlier this year the first warehouse at the logistics park was completed which is let on a 15-year lease to Iron Mountain, a US data centre storage provider.