eCorrugated has taken 198,000 sq ft at Aviator Park in Ellesmere Port for cardboard box manufacturing. As Place North West reported, the letting covers manufacturing space.
Manufacturing, not storage
This is worth separating from the usual big-shed news. A distribution warehouse stores things other people made. A manufacturing letting means production, which employs more people per square foot and pays differently.
Corrugated packaging is also a business that has to sit near its customers. Cardboard boxes are bulky and light, so shipping empty ones long distances is expensive. Manufacturers locate close to the food, drink and ecommerce operations that use them, which tells you something about the industrial base around this part of Cheshire.
Ellesmere Port keeps building
We covered United Utilities’ £140m upgrade to the Ellesmere Port wastewater treatment works in August, and made the point that treatment capacity is what allows industry and housing to connect at all.
The town sits alongside the Stanlow refinery complex, the Vauxhall plant that Stellantis converted to electric van production, and the Hynet industrial decarbonisation cluster. Heavy industry needs somewhere to put its effluent and somewhere to put its packaging suppliers, and both are happening within a few miles.
What we don’t know
The published detail doesn’t give job numbers, the lease length or the rent.
Job numbers are the ones worth asking for. A 198,000 sq ft manufacturing operation should support a meaningfully larger workforce than the same footprint used for storage, and the difference is the entire reason this letting is better news for Ellesmere Port than another distribution unit would be.
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