In 1978, a young man walked into the London offices of Overseas Containers Limited for his first professional job. The building on Braham Street in Aldgate, just off the Whitechapel Road, hummed with a particular kind of energy — the quiet pride of an industry that had just fought and won a hard battle.
The dockers' strikes were over. The resistance to containerisation — fierce, bitter, and understandable — had finally given way. And what remained was something extraordinary: a company, and an entire industry, settling into the realisation that it had just changed the world.
The role was in finance. But the view from the finance team at OCL in 1978 was a front-row seat to one of the great industrial transformations of the twentieth century.
The OCL offices were a world of massive paper sheets — schedules, manifests, freight calculations — all produced by hand. The financial numbers were crunched by a team of comptometer operators: women from the East End of London who were, in the truest sense, geniuses at their machines. They worked with a speed and accuracy that was almost impossible to believe. The comptometer — a heavy manual mechanical calculating machine — was their instrument, and they played it brilliantly.
Down the corridor, a different kind of transformation was gathering pace. The computer department — not yet called IT — was quietly preparing to change everything. This was the pre-desktop era. The machines were vast, the ambitions larger still. The comptometer operators' days were numbered, and everyone knew it.
Two revolutions at once: the physical one, out in the docks, and the informational one, building quietly in the back offices. OCL was living through both simultaneously.
Before containerisation, the docks were organised chaos. Goods arrived. Goods were unpacked, sorted, repacked, handled, re-handled, loaded and reloaded. Casual labour. Constant friction. Every transfer point a potential failure. The cost — in time, money, damage, and theft — was enormous.
By 1978, that world had almost vanished. In its place: the clean, sleek flow of boxes. Ship to dock to truck to rail, moving as a single unit without being opened, touched, or repacked. The container had done what no individual vehicle improvement could ever have achieved — it had redesigned the system itself.
Working in the finance team, you saw this not just as an operational change but as an economic one. The numbers told the story. The container hadn't just made shipping faster. It had made it fundamentally different.
Over the years that followed, OCL containers became a familiar sight. Ports, terminals, railheads, docklands — in the UK, in Australia, in South Africa, in the Far East. The white or blue hull, the OCL mark. It became, for anyone who knew what to look for, a symbol of a particular moment in history.
Decades later, the founder of Optimised Container Logistics found himself looking at that logo differently. Not as a memory, but as a possibility.
The image came fully formed: a cargo bike, moving through a city street, carrying a small container — clean, standardised, interoperable — bearing the OCL mark. A miniature version of what had transformed global trade, now doing the same for the last mile.
The trademark registers were checked. The name was available. The decision was made not just to borrow it, but to deliberately reinvent it — same logo, refined tagline, entirely new purpose. A living continuation of something that had started in those Braham Street offices in 1978.
OCL is not a nostalgic project. It is the application of a lesson learned at first hand: that the container — not the vehicle — is the unit that scales. That standardisation is what transforms a good idea into infrastructure. That the McLean Moment happens when an industry stops optimising the wrong thing.
We learned that in the seventies. We're building it again now.