Special types of self storage in London

One of the most useful things about London being a world city is that you can buy almost anything you want there. Whether it’s goat meat, Ghanaian yams, hookah pipes, or even a 350 year-old Samurai sword – whatever you need to buy, someone, somewhere in London, has it for sale already.

The same is true of London self storage. As the capital of the UK self storage market, London has a host of specialist storage centres that cater to people’s most unlikely requirements. Whatever strange item you want to store, the chances are that other people do so already, with self storage options, both orthodox and unorthodox, on offer across the city.

Here are just a few of them:

Wine self storage

Wine storage is an ancient industry that usually involves specialist companies renting space to large-scale collectors and wine investors for years at a time. However, Big Yellow’s Fulham branch now has its own wine self storage facility located in the cellars, aimed specifically at people looking for flexibility in storing their wines.

The Big Yellow self storage website boasts of 500 climate-controlled cellars, each offering unlimited access between 5am and 11pm each day. Unlike many traditional wine storage companies, Big Yellow’s flexible self storage approach means they need only be booked for a week.

They also offer collection and delivery services to other parts of the country, and most remarkably of all, hold regular wine events in the cellars themselves, including wine-tasting evenings hosted by the West London Wine School – surely the world’s only wine-tasting society that meets inside a self storage unit!

The involvement of a major company like Big Yellow self storage shows it isn’t only the small, specialist operators who dare to be different, as they have made a major investment in the Fulham self storage centre and provided a dedicated area on their website to promote it. Interestingly, such self storage arrangements for storing wine are apparently quite common over in America, although despite Big Yellow’s involvement, there hasn’t been a rush to open lots more of them here.

Vehicle self storage

The dwindling number of homes that have garages nowadays has led to many people keeping their vehicles in self storage, with specialist storage solutions for all manner of different contraptions.

Fort Box Self Storage, which has its London site in St John’s Wood, is a dedicated all-rounder in the vehicle storage stakes, claiming to offer specialist solutions for people to keep their car, caravan, boat, motorbike, jet-ski or all-terrain vehicle in their self storage units (which makes you wonder if they’ve had a customer storing them all at the same time). Other providers concentrate solely on storing one type of vehicle, like the Islington-based firm London Car Storage, which provides storage facilities for both current and classic vehicles, with on-site cleaning and maintenance services available.

Fine art self storage

You can store fine art in an ordinary self storage unit, by all means, provided that it’s dry and secure (which the vast majority of self storage facilities most certainly are – that’s their job!)

But for high-value art, insurance becomes a problem. There comes a point where the value becomes too high to take the risk of self storage, so you will need the services of specialist fine art storage opreators. And London – home of the big auction houses such as Sotheby’s and Christie’s – certainly can offer that. Cadogan Tate, and Christie’s Fine Art Storage Services (CFASS) are two examples.

But this, of course is no longer “self storage”: they can’t have clients, armed with their own keys, roaming freely around their storage vaults! (For more details about self storage solutions for fine art, see our article that subject.)

Weapon storage

For people looking to store dangerous weapons, or whose wives don’t want them in the house, London is also home to firms that offer this. James Purdey & Sons, based at Audley House, offers a range of gun storage options for times when their owners are out of the country, or when it’s simply inconvenient to have them at home.

They offer to keep guns for as little as £4 a week per gun, with cleaning and maintenance services also provided on-site. This is not quite the same as self storage, as keeping guns in a self storage unit would almost always be illegal (see our separate article on this subject), but as they are a licensed company this is the next best thing, and certainly a very reasonably-priced option.

Need specialist self storage?

You may be worried about finding the right kind of specialist storage to meet your needs. Food products? Vintage clothing? Paintings? Paint?

Self storage could well be the best, most secure and most economic option. If in doubt, ask: self storage managers deal with a vast variety of stored items all day and every day, especially in London. They will know if they can or can’t or want to handle your specialist self storage needs.

2 Responses to “Special types of self storage in London”

1. Fort Carson Storage Units says:

   April 1, 2011 at 5:08 am

   Never even considered the existence of a weapon’s storage. You can really find anything in London then.

2. Storage London says:

   July 7, 2011 at 2:00 pm

   I never knew that storage companies had climate controlled cellars for wine. That’s something I could be interested in, it could be a worthy investment in the long run. In fact I didn’t know that half of these things could be stored, I just assumed most people put away furniture or old boxes of junk.