A look behind the scenes at the South Midlands Mail Centre

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Feature: A look behind the scenes at the South Midlands Mail Centre in Swan Valley Way, Northampton

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Christmas starts for many of us when we start to buy the first presents or when we put up the decorations.

For the Royal Mail it starts in February. The reason for the early start is the company has to deal with an avalanche of mail in December.

From December 15 -24 at its South Midlands Mail Centre in Swan Valley Way, Northampton it deals with 5 million parcels and letters and 2m of those will be delivered in Northamptonshire.

Monday, December 15, was a red letter for the Royal Mail in Northampton as this signified its busiest day of the year. In 24 hours it would collect, sort and deliver 750,000 parcels.

Standing on the ‘shop floor’ to witness this operation was like standing in a train station. A tannoy system with a familiar ping ping followed by the message rang out.

The building is a large clearing house, at one end the mail comes in, it is weighed and sorted. The letters and Christmas cards go through what looks a lot like a large tumble drier but is actually called an Intelligent letter sorting machine.

It then gets machine sorted and hand sorted to make sure it gets to the right part of the depot to be sent out to the customer

One of the workers who sort the mail is Penny Bellhouse who has worked with Royal Mail for 16 years.

Penny has an encyclopedic knowledge of all the postcodes across the country.

Her main role is sorting parcels and letters for South East England putting them into the bags for the different areas like Croydon and Kingston Upon Thames.

She also has a special skill of being to find the correct address from letters with illegible address.

She said: “Some of the addresses are badly written or very vague.

“We even get letters which say the house with the red door three doors down from the pub in the village.

“I just know about the postcodes as I am passionate about my work.

“I initially joined as temp working for two months but then I saw an advert, I applied and got the job.

“I get a kick out of what I do.”

Looking down on the operation on Monday, Plant manager, Bob Brady said: “At the moment there are about 300 staff working, but from 5pm this number will rise to 1,200.

“We have four shifts working each day and during the Christmas period we hire an additional 350 staff.

“Today (Monday) we will deal with 5 million items of mail in a 24 hour period.

“Last week the volume of parcels due to internet shopping increased nine fold and this phenomenon is not slowing down.

“We are prepared for such things and that is why we start planning in February for Christmas.

“There is a lot of pressure on us to get it right for customers and that is why we plan early.

“As well this depot here there are 10 parcel sort centres across the UK which we can utilize.

“The nearest one to us is in Milton Keynes.

“Our aim by Christmas Eve is to get everything which comes through her out and to the customers.

“We have a final sweep here at 6am to make sure everything has gone.

“The last date for second class mail is today, Thursday and Saturday for first class letters.”

Mr Brady said this depot did deal with a lot of post for Father Christmas.

He wanted to assure all the children every item deliver to Santa Claus reached him what ever the weather.