Bibby Stockholm

Empty Vessel: The Story of the Global Economy in One Barge
by Ian Kumekawa
Published 6 May 2025

In fact, there was plenty of demand for accommodation barges; drawing on the example of Hamburg’s use of the vessels to house refugees, the British government considered mooring one or more of the Bibby Line’s barges in Essex, northeast of London, for the same purpose.[59] In 2023, another Bibby barge, the Bibby Stockholm, arrived in Portland for just this job, to widespread public outcry. HMP The Weare in Portland Port in 2008. As of 2024, another barge owned by the Bibby Line, the Bibby Stockholm, sits in the same location. In short, the reason that the Vessel had to go had nothing to do with the demand for beds in the UK. Rather, it was simply that the conditions on The Weare were out of step with the image of reform that officials in Tony Blair’s New Labour government wanted to project.

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The barge would be expensive, and housing migrants would be a major drain on local services, especially the NHS and the police.[19] Just days after the barge opened in August 2023, it had to be evacuated because Legionella bacteria was found in its water supply. The thirty-nine asylum seekers on board were transferred to a local hotel on terra firma.[20] Just weeks later, they were back on board. But the Bibby Stockholm proved even more temporary than its predecessor. In July 2024, shortly after surging into power in a landslide election, Keir Starmer’s Labour government announced the Stockholm would close. A poster protesting the arrival of the Bibby Stockholm on a bus shelter in Portland * * * •  •  • The settings in which the Vessel existed were important, but the barge at the center of this story has always—at least partially—been between or outside formal jurisdictions.

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More barges arrived in Hamburg as the number of refugees surged. In the early 1990s, Hamburg leased further barges from Bibby—the Bibby Altona, the Bibby Challenge, and the Bibby Kalmar—to accommodate a rising number of refugees fleeing war in the Balkans. Contracts from Dutch and British governments followed—including one for the Bibby Stockholm, which housed asylum seekers in southern England in 2023 and 2024. In 1992, there were around 19,700 asylum seekers in Hamburg alone; the next year, that number had more than doubled, to forty-two thousand.[39] By the early 2000s, the population housed on the barges had shifted to include more arrivals from Africa and Turkey, in addition to those from southeastern Europe.