Amazon opens new fulfilment centre in Northampton
The online retailer also announced the UK’s largest cross-dock facility in Kettering.
AMAZON HAS opened a new fulfilment centre in Northampton and announced plans for a second major site in nearby Kettering, taking its investment in a single county to more than £1 billion and creating more than 4,000 jobs.
The Kettering site will be the UK’s largest cross-dock facility, sorting and routing goods across the country. The Northampton centre is one of the most advanced logistics operations in the UK, with thousands of robots working alongside employees across three floors. The Northampton site stores tens of millions of items across three floors of robotics, where thousands of Hercules robots retrieve products and bring them directly to employees.
They form part of a year of significant investment by Amazon across the UK and come after the company announced its planned investment of £40 billion in the UK last year.
The Kettering facility represents a £500 million investment and will open this autumn. The 900,000-square-foot site will process around 20 million items each week, creating more than 2,000 permanent jobs and hundreds of seasonal roles. Recruitment is under way for engineers, HR and IT professionals, finance specialists, and operations teams.
Pay for frontline roles starts at almost £30,000 per year, with private medical insurance, subsidised meals, an employee discount, and funded career development from day one.
“As someone from Northampton, I’m proud to see this county become one of the most important regions in our UK network,” said Gareth Davies, Amazon regional director. “Our new fulfilment centre is up and running with cutting-edge robotics, a modern working environment, and genuine career development opportunities. With another £500 million facility on the horizon, this is an incredibly exciting time for our teams and the wider community.”
Other recent developments include the opening of a new fulfilment centre in Hull creating 2,000 jobs and announced a new distribution centre in Peterborough launching this autumn, that will replenish fulfilment centres across the UK and create more than 1,400 jobs.
Amazon has also started construction on a new delivery station in Stockton-on-Tees – Amazon’s first building in the UK to pursue zero carbon certification – featuring cement-free paving, AI-powered carbon tracking, and mass timber construction. The £40 million site opens this autumn, creating around 100 jobs.
The firm also started rollout of more than 160 electric heavy goods vehicles on UK roads.
