Watch how internet shopping has revolutionised the way your parcels are sorted and delivered in West London

Internet shopping has truly revolutionised life in London and the UK.

Compared to even ten years ago, you can now get almost everything online and delivered to your door in remarkably quick time.

But what really goes on behind the scenes to make this happen?

The fact is that Royal Mail and other couriers now have to process millions more parcels each year than they did before the internet age and that involves a massive logistical operation that we don’t often see or think about.

My London reporter Ged Cann decided to visit a West London sorting office in Hounslow to find out exactly how it happens.

Until last year, every parcel that passed through the Royal Mail’s Jubilee Mail Centre in Hounslow was sorted by hand.

Now a new machine has turbo-charged the process, allowing staff to sort 10,000 parcels an hour via high-speed conveyor belts and lightning-fast barcode scanning.

Although automation usually means redundancies, Centre Manager Michael Clarke said staffing levels would remain the same.

The Hounslow depo was among the first to receive the Parcel Sorting Machine (PSM), which currently run in just 2% of sorting centres.

Within five years, that figure will sit at 80%.

This will be part of a £1.8 billion investment by the company in the UK postal service.

Mr Clarke said staff had welcomed the technology, because it made the highly physical job of sorting parcels far less demanding.

He said: “Now you just need to orientate a parcel more than anything else. They don’t need to pick it up, they don’t need to look at an address at all.”

About 90% of letters are already sorted by machines, and the shift to doing the same with parcels reflects a shift in what people mail.

Mr Clarke said the Royal Mail used to be a letter service that also took parcels, now it was a parcel service that also takes letters.

PSM Work Area Manager Ivan Gidson said staff found the machine scary at first, but had come to like it.

He said: “The onslaught of internet shopping increased the amount of items we get as a business.

“We’ve probably increased by a couple of hundred percent when I first started on the job.”