How big is self storage in London?

By David on March 10th, 2011 | 2 Comments

London is undoubtedly the hub of the UK self storage market. It’s where Britain’s first self storage centre opened in the 1980s, it has by far the most self storage centres of any UK settlement, and both the greatest demand for, and recognition of, the self storage industry as a business.

Yet London is not an equal place, and you don’t see self centres evenly spread around the city. There are only a certain number of them, and they tend to have been built in specific places. Finding out how many of them there are, and where they tend to be built, tells you a huge amount about the self storage industry in London.

How many self storage centres are there in London?

This is a difficult question to answer, as where does London really end and the rest of the country begin? Storage.co.uk found several different ways of counting London’s self storage centres, from a narrow city definition to a regional perspective.

The Storage.co.uk database lists a grand total of 147 London self storage centres, meaning they have addresses containing London postcodes. Given there are roughly 1200 self storage centres in the whole of the UK, this means the London postal area contains over 12% of the entire UK self storage industry.

However, self storage tends to cluster around the edges of cities, and the numbers increase a lot the further you widen your net. If you include the counties that border London, several of which contain chunks of the M25, then the number more than doubles, to 329 self storage centres ‒ including 38 in Kent, 46 in Surrey and 41 in Essex, counties which all contain many commuter towns whose residents are employed in the main London boroughs.

This means that around 27% of the UK self storage industry is in Greater London and adjacent counties ‒ more than a quarter of the total. This number could then arguably be increased even further if you include the rest of the Home Counties (a loosely defined notion, but essentially the counties clustering around London); another 84 self storage centres can be added if you stretch the London region to include self storage in Sussex, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire. However, the area this covers involves a number of other towns ‒ including Brighton, Aylesbury, Milton Keynes, Luton and Watford ‒ which, while economically linked to London, remain geographically distinct and could, of course, be counted separately.

In sum, looking at the biggest possible picture, self storage in London and Home Counties accounts for 413 of 1200 UK self storage centres: 34%, or just over a third. This means that the London area has the biggest concentration of self storage centres in the UK, and indeed in the whole of Europe as well.

Where are London self storage centres located?

London self storage centres are strongly clustered geographically, in a way that reflects different levels of wealth across the city. West London, the city’s most affluent area on average, is home to 70 of those self storage centres in the London postal area (nearly half), while East London postcodes contain just 6.

This also tells us something about the approach of London self storage companies, who seem to be trying to get as near to their customers as possible. Presumably it is more expensive for them to buy or lease warehouses in West London than in East London, owing to the higher property costs, but this hasn’t stopped them deciding to locate there en masse, rather than at the edge of the city or within less expensive areas. In some UK urban areas, self storage only appears in the retail parks and industrial buildings around the edges of cities, but for London self storage this doesn’t seem to be the case.

Company annual reports usefully contain maps that give an indication of the clustering. This is the case with the annual reports for 2010 of Safestore (page 5) and Big Yellow (page 3), which both use inset maps to cater for the concentration of centres in the London area. These reveal a few interesting facts about where London self storage centres tend to be located: both companies have avoided quite a large chunk of East London; both have a strong presence around the centre of the city, and both have established a ring of suburban self storage centres around London, focussing on areas like Bromley, Wimbledon, Chiswick and Romford.

They also reveal the differences between the two self storage companies in London, as Big Yellow Self Storage seems to have concentrated more on sites in South London, while Safestore has done somewhat the opposite. It’s also interesting that they both seem to have almost identical locations in a number of places, suggesting that London self storage is concentrated around centres where there might be particular business parks or retail developments that host a number of different companies.

These places would be likely to have a number of other self storage companies operating in them as well, so they can all compete directly with each other for passing traffic, or because it might be easier to get planning permission for a new self storage centre from one of the London boroughs that have allowed them before.

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