Britain makes way for new £1.5bn superport For starters, says Moore: "We're not just building a port, but integrating it with what will be Europe's biggest logistics park. That's the really exciting part. It allows companies to completely re-evaluate their supply chains. And the logistics park is the biggest jobs generator. On a 995-acre site three times the size of the City of London, DP World is building a quay wall that will, in time, extend to 2.7km. It will be capable of handling six of the world's biggest ships, each one around a quarter of a mile long and laden with up to 18,000 20ft container units. Capacity will be 3.5m TEU a year. Just 200m behind the docks is the logistics park, or distribution centre. The round-the-clock operation is so automated, there's no need for floodlights. Containers can be moved in the dark. When fully operational, the port will employ 2,000 people, while 10,000 more will work in the logistics area, directly linked to a new rail spur and the A13. Consultants Oxford Economics believe the project will create another 24,000 indirect jobs in the wider economy, making 36,000 in total. Raul Kharbanda, head of research and customer insight at UK Trade and Investment, says: "London Gateway is the largest investment in the South East and the largest creator of new jobs in the UK today." The UK-listed DP World operates more than 60 container terminals across six continents, so has plenty of places to invest its money - not least economies that are growing much faster, such as India and China. Ask Moore why DP World has chosen London and the first part of the answer is a history lesson. "With London Gateway we are doing nothing more than going back to our roots," he says. We are getting the biggest ships in the world as close as we can to the biggest point of consumption and giving cargo owners the opportunity to store and warehouse their goods right next to the ships. That model, he says, was what once made the Port of London the world's biggest trading centre. But since London's 19th century heyday, the focus has shifted - both globally and within the UK. Ships became too big to travel up the Thames to the London quays, where you now find Canary Wharf and London City Airport. Britain's container ports moved further from the capital, notably up the east coast to Britain's biggest container port, Felixstowe, and along the south coast to Southampton. With that came a necessary, though arguably inefficient, reshaping of Britain's inland distribution network. The upshot is that today only 10pc of the UK's warehouse capacity is located in its biggest and wealthiest consumer market - London and the South East, the home to 16m people. Britain's distribution hub is in the Midlands, meaning thousands of truck journeys a day ferrying containers to and from the UK's main market. Moore contrasts that with the potential of London Gateway. We have 15m people living within 80km of us and a big cost in the transportation chain is the cost of moving the goods from the port to the end user. If you can keep that link as short as possible, if the difference is driving 20 miles or 100, you are saving money. Indeed, Moore believes the new port will take 2,000 trucks a day off Britain's roads. But none of this stacks up if you can't handle the latest mega-ships, which have pretty much tripled in size over the past decade. Despite the expansion of Felixstowe, which is owned by Hong Kong-based Hutchison Ports, Moore argues there is "an increasing shortage of capacity in the UK to handle these massive container ships." Today there are less than 100 of them in service. By the end of next year, there will be more than 200. As shipping lines look to improve their economies of scale, ships are getting bigger and bigger. The UK is an island nation, it has to have port capacity for the 21st century. Ask why Britain needs to have the big ships call directly, rather than have goods transhipped from the continental ports of Rotterdam, Antwerp and Hamburg on smaller vessels, and Moore grabs an analogy from the aviation industry. It's not that different from the idea of hub airports. If you talk to businessmen in London, one reason they are here is because they can jump on a plane and go direct to Dubai or New York or Hong Kong. What if you couldn't? If you had to go via Schiphol, Paris, Frankfurt. It can be done. But is it going to make the UK more attractive for business or less? It's another link in the chain and that's a disadvantage. It's the same with ports. 90pc of our trade comes by sea. And we are big enough to have these big ships come in directly. That shortens transit times for importers and exporters. It's about ensuring we keep this island nation directly connected to the M1 of world trade. Otherwise we are an A road or a B road off someone else's highway. Delivering that vision, though, has proved anything but a run-of-the mill construction project. To handle the ships, DP World's contractors - a joint-venture between Laing O'Rourke and Dredging International - are digging a 100km channel to a depth of up to 16.5m and using the 30m tonnes of material removed to build the new port. "It's built on reclaimed land," says Moore. When you drive around, the sat nav still thinks you're driving in the river. It hasn't caught up. Moore recalls how he stuck a flag in the first bit of new land created and dubbed it "Simon's Island." The island has long gone, engulfed by new land. That only tells half the story, though. "On the line of the dredge there were over 500 articles that we had to have a solution for," he says, including various shipwrecks. The remains of some, like the Brick Barge, HMS Ash and The Dovenby have had to be removed. "The Dovenby, which sank in 1915, was carrying a cargo of guano, basically bird poo," says Moore. The phosphate in the guano was used in ammunition. It was on its way to Antwerp for the Germans and was captured by the Royal Navy, taken up the river and sunk. Other dredging hazards have been less predictable. We've recovered 114 pieces of ordnance, the biggest one was 2,000lb. It was a parachute drop in the Second World War. It had 750 kilos of explosives on it. It had to be detonated by the Royal Navy. David Brown, the joint-venture's deputy project director, says the dredgers carry experts to deal with the regular finds. "To us our knees knock because we're non-experts," he says. If you ask a crew member 'hold this', he won't. That's why we have experts in there, ex-military. They look and say, 'it's not even fused'. They certainly do bring a lot of peace to the vessel. All that's before the requirement to protect wildlife, including a vast animal relocation project and, as Moore explains, building a new sea-wall to re-create "inter-tidal mudflats where Dover sole are born." Does London Gateway already have anchor clients, so to speak? "We do, but we're not saying anything yet," says Moore. "People who are coming have concerns over how they may be treated in between time if we make their names public now," he says. Competitors are braced for a fight, with Felixstowe claiming that shipping lines plying the North Sea will not want to divert so far up the Thames Estuary. Moore stresses though that the project has the support of nine commercial banks and the European Investment Bank. "We spent a lot of time looking at the opportunity and making sure we want to do this," he says. One advantage here is we are the landlord, we own the freehold. Apart from the Port Jebel Ali in Dubai, that is not the usual DP World business model. Normally, we have a concession and pay concession fees to a separate harbour authority. Being the landlord has its complexities too, of course, not least when you have to build the port. Especially when faced with the occasional bomb threat.