Warehouses. Large. Cavernous, even. Ugly? Definitely conspicuous in their surroundings. But, in a twist of irony, crucial to the online world we now live in. For the internet, or at least retail on the internet, relies almost entirely on these huge storage and distribution centres dotted around the UK, and indeed the world. We have replaced physical shops on our high street for anonymous, enormous, incongruous mammoths in the countryside. And we all know what happened to the mammoth.
Our desire for here and now products, next day delivery, and a huge range of choice of anything from glow in the dark garden gnomes to a 6ft statue of Zeus, means that these gigantic spaces are here to stay and probably increase in number and size.
For some reason, probably that of speed, efficiency and cost, these glorified sheds are yet to be designed in a way that is aesthetically pleasing or suited to their surroundings. Instead they squat unceremoniously in the landscape like giant cubes of sugar in our green and pleasant pastures. And we all know too much sugar is bad for us.
Maybe as time goes on, architects and engineers will begin to design these buildings sympathetically, using the vast acreage of the roofs for plants, or solar panels. This would go some way to offset the carbon footprint of the extra delivery trucks now on our roads. Rooftop meadows could provide space for pollinators and birds to live, making up for the area the size of - insert a relevant size measurement in relation to Wales here - taken up by these buildings.
They are modern cathedrals to consumerism. They consume space, resources and land, and churn out products which our chubby fingers typed away ordering a mere seconds before. This is the modern world. We are becoming increasingly distant from our natural world and surroundings, and are destroying more of it in our continued distancing from it.
Warehouses were initially built in correlation to the capacity of the vessels transporting the goods. That's why the many old quayside buildings up and down the country are almost perfect for conversion into luxury flats now, they were built on a human scale. Increased warehouse capacity means increased haulage capacity, and vice versa. This cycle is forcing us to build more, bigger warehouses, then build more lorries, roads, services to cater for the vehicles etc. All this because we stopped going to a physical shop and went on a computer instead. It's a cruel twist of fate but also invisible to most of us, so we don't think about it.
We can't change the way the modern economy, and in particular our internet economy, now functions. That's luddite in attitude and philistine in thinking. But we should look at the real-world impact our online actions have. Warehouses are probably the most obvious physical representation of this. If nothing else is done, we could at least require them to be designed in sympathy with the surrounding environment, and provide provisions to replace, support or cooperate with the natural environment they have disturbed.
The oak tree in the picture above could potentially live for hundreds more years. What will the solid expanse of white panelling constituting the wall of the warehouse look like in 500 years? If it's even standing, what purpose will it have? The oak tree's role is pretty clear. The warehouse is the great pretender.
This article was originally published in 2016.
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