When Amazon came to town: Swindon feels strain as new depot sucks up jobs

Black boxes rattle along miles of conveyor belt, carrying everything from toys to painkillers amid a cacophony of alarms and the faint hum of Christmas songs. "I'm looking around here at anything that might not be right, but it's actually running very smoothly," says David Tindal, the general manager of the Swindon fulfilment centre. "The team has been fantastic. We spend the whole year preparing for this peak time, like a good football club preparing for the cup final." Known internally as BRS2 – using a naming system based on the nearest big airport (in this case, Bristol) – the warehouse is a vision in gleaming concrete, steel and glass landed on the Wiltshire countryside.