Containers, trailers and drivers all meet at the port, and the port runs on its own clock. Port Intelligence shows what the public record says about the UK’s freight gateways and where ships are right now.
Two kinds of evidence
- DfT port freight statistics (PORT0101). The Department for Transport’s published tonnage figures by port, direction and year. FreightIntel keeps a register of 162 UK ports, named as the DfT names them, and holds the latest retained figure for each. This is history and scale, not today’s traffic.
- Live AIS ship positions. Ships broadcast their position by AIS. FreightIntel listens through AISStream and keeps positions inside reviewed approach zones for eight freight ports: Dover, London, Felixstowe, Southampton, Liverpool, Grimsby and Immingham, Tees and Hartlepool, and Milford Haven. Each position carries the time it was observed.
What you see
For each port with live evidence, a list of vessels ordered by most recent observation, with the evidence type and how fresh it is. Ports without live evidence still appear in the full register, with empty live fields and freshness marked unavailable.
What it does not do
- It does not predict arrivals. A ship’s position is not a promise to arrive at a time, and no arrival estimate is published until a properly labelled model exists.
- It does not know what is on board. AIS says where a ship is, not what cargo it carries or whether a gate will be busy.
- It does not cover every port live. Eight ports have live ship evidence today. The rest show statistics only.
Data honesty
Where first-hand evidence has not arrived yet, the field stays visibly empty. Licence and attribution details are on the data sources page, including the AIS terms.