Kent is becoming warehouse country
Kent’s warehouse boom brings jobs and investment, but is changing what parts of the county are for
On the edge of Sittingbourne, Kent exists as a set of useful numbers. The M2 is four miles away. Dover is 50 minutes away, and the Channel Tunnel is 51. Some 1.2 million people live within a 45-minute drive, including 40,000 who already work in transport and storage.
The sales pitch does not trouble itself with castles, orchards or reasonably pleasant places to walk. It does include one final advantage. Average workplace earnings in Kent are lower than across the south east and Britain as a whole. 'Wages are lower than Purfleet and Dartford', the marketing material explains.
None of this is untrue. It is simply Kent as seen from a loading bay.
Panattoni Park Sittingbourne already contains a 440,000 sqft building taken by ID Logistics and a 58,000 sqft depot for DPD. Another 206,000 sqft unit is waiting for an occupier. Panattoni says its investment in the site has reached £170m.
It is one development among several, but it captures a change that is now measurable across the county. Kent is becoming warehouse country.
The official figures make this slightly awkward to count. The Valuation Office Agency groups warehouses with factories and workshops as industrial floorspace, so it is not possible to attribute every new square metre to logistics. Even with that qualification, the movement is hard to miss.
Industrial floorspace across Kent and Medway grew from 9.68m square metres in 2011 to 11.49m in 2025. That is an increase of 18.6%, compared with 12.9% across the south east and 9.1% in England.
The countywide figure disguises where the most dramatic change has taken place. Swale still has the largest amount of industrial space, although its total has fallen slightly since 2019. Gravesham’s grew by almost a third between 2011 and 2025, Medway’s by a quarter and Maidstone’s by just under 23%.
In Dartford, it rose by nearly 80%.
We have been through the figures and planning records behind Kent’s warehouse boom. Join the Kent Current for free to continue reading about the proposed million-square-foot development at Lenham, the jobs and traffic these buildings bring, and what the county gets in return.
