City Link (company)
British next day courier company

City Link was a British next day courier company, operating from 1969 to 2015. It was based in Coventry, West Midlands with offices in other parts of the country. On 24 December 2014, the company entered administration. Ernst & Young (EY) was appointed as the administrator, and immediately ceased accepting parcels from customers. City Link officially ceased trading on 1 January 2015.
History
City Link was founded in 1969 by two minicab drivers, Harry Hammond-Seaman and Jo Burt, as a subsidiary of Orbit Cargo Services Ltd, to provide a cross-town transfer service for British Rail's Red Star Parcels. At the time, Red Star only operated on direct passenger trains, so a sender in Brighton could not dispatch a parcel to Norwich, as a transfer had to be undertaken in London between Victoria Station and Liverpool Street station.
In addition, the Red Star service was limited to station-to-station only. Following increasing demand from its customers, City Link established a nationwide network of delivery agents to collect parcels from the local station and deliver them to the consignee.
With one depot and three employees, the company had a growing customer base, turning over £100 thousand per year.
“City Link (company)” enters the record as british next day courier company. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what City, Link and company can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“City Link (company)” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, City, Link and company provides the most credible route into that argument.
The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5123281. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1969, 2015 and 2014.
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This entry incorporates text from “City Link (company)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.