An Englishman’s home is… getting smaller?

How self storage compensates for our houses getting smaller

According to the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) if you are reading this in London or the South-East then you’re likely to be feeling rather cramped. This is because they’ve identified that region as having been at the forefront of an architectural phenomenon: the steady shrinking of British houses over the last thirty years, something which has likely been of great benefit to the storage industry.

CABE’s survey found that 47% of residents in this region said their abode lacked enough space for all the furniture they owned, and that 57% didn’t have enough storage space overall. This shows where there has clearly been an opening for the self storage industry as people have looked to fill the gap by renting additional room for their belongings. After all, if an average studio flat in London has a floor area of 324 square feet, then its storage space could be almost doubled by hiring a medium-sized room with one of the big companies.

Yet it is not merely flats which have been shrinking like Alice in Wonderland. All around us, on development sites across the nation, the average house has slowly become pokier too. Nothing shows this more clearly than the fact that 2-bedroom have overtaken 4-bedroom as the most commonly built type; or that in London, the average house now has a floor area of 830 sq ft, smaller than in Dublin, Sydney or Berlin, and possibly exaggerating the size of new homes as it includes the mansions and townhouses that hang on from a more capacious age.

Abandoning Parker-Morris

The root cause of this trend lies in an obscure change to the planning regulations made twenty-five years ago. Before then a set of building requirements called the Parker-Morris Standards enforced a minimum square footage of space for each type of house depending on its number of bedrooms. Yet this was abandoned by the Thatcher government in 1980 as a way of stimulating the property market, and the average room in a new house has gradually decreased to be 170 sq ft now, half that in France and only the dimensions of a middling storage unit.

The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has recently said he intends to create a new set of such regulations which could be gradually adopted by the private building sector. However, there is a natural tension between this desire to make homes bigger and his pledge to have created 290,000 extra houses by the end of each year, especially with land in the capital being at such a premium that there are already 110 existing abodes per hectare (nearly three times the national average, and over twice what it was 15 years ago).

This relentless increase in the need for new homes suggests that the role of storage will continue to grow in the years ahead. Important demographic trends – the rise in people of all ages living alone, the high divorce rate and lower incomes after this cataclysmic recession, for instance – are pushing people towards flats like never before. Indeed, they now account for nearly half of the new build homes in Britain (46%). As flats are often characterised by a lack of storage space, this is bound to generate further new custom for the self storage industry.

Self Storage to the rescue

There are already signs that self storage centres can step in to fill this void. A recent development of flats in Croydon contained 800 properties, the smallest of them being single-bedroom and just 350 square feet in size. To get around their lack of storage space, Barratt Homes then rented out its ground floor to Access Self Storage so they could provide units for the residents. This marks the first time such a step has been taken by a developer, and should pave the way for more as Access had apparently received several enquiries from future residents before they had even moved in.

The fact that the self storage industry has developed in Britain almost completely in parallel with the shrinking of houses following the loss of Parker Morriss suggests that it has already benefitted from this phenomenon. With space set to become even more precious over the coming years, it should be the case that house owners continue it to view self storage as a haven for the belongings they can no longer accommodate in their (ever-smaller) homes.