Consumers these days are becoming increasingly aware of the environmental impacts their buying choices have. This means that a ‘green’ image has suddenly become very valuable ‒ hence the energy with which many companies are now busily pursuing one.
Every May and June, weighed down by improbable quantities of clothes, CD players, sports equipment, stolen road signs and, as the picture suggests, possibly even a few books, thousands of cars make a journey together across Britain. Although heading for different locations, their mission remains firmly uniform: to retrieve the returning son or daughter from […]
So you’ve got some wine you want to keep for a while — a case or three left over from a party, or a van-load from a booze cruise to the continent. Your home doesn’t have a cellar, and you know that wine doesn’t like the warm temperatures of domestic life. So can you store your […]
To its detractors, there has always been one simple argument against the relentless rise of the self storage business. This is that it is too expensive; that it succeeds through essentially conning people out of their money by convincing them of the artificial need for more space and then selling it to them at a […]
At first glance, British self storage seems an impressive beast, at least if its vital statistics are anything to go by: 750 facilities nationwide that serve 235,000 customers, generating revenues to the tune of £360 million a year. Yet this is nothing compared to the scale of business done across the Atlantic, where industry revenues generate more money than Hollywood and 1 in every 11 households is a customer.
One morning in November 2008, and elderly, retired lawyer was found in the hallway outside his flat in South London dozing gently on a stack of old newspapers. Returning from a professional dinner the previous evening, he had found himself unable to enter the property, where he had lived alone in genteel decline for decades. He was unable to get in because the flat was packed to the ceiling with junk, and, in his absence, a pile of old newspapers had toppled against the front door. The stack in the hallway had previously been carefully deposited there by him because there simply had not been enough room for them within.
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.
It is not often that self-storage facilities hit the headlines, but this was the fate of Access Storage in Hanwell, West London, in March 2004. In one of its units was a 600 kg bag of ammonium nitrate, a relatively cheap chemical used widely as an agricultural fertilizer. And also as an ingredient to make bombs — the kind of bombs that have been used to devastating effect in Bali, Oklahoma City, London, Spain and Saudi Arabia.
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