Last Sunday morning at the Space Station self-storage depot in Cricklewood, north-west London, Merlin, 49, a care worker, was on her weekly visit to her unit – a space not much larger than a broom cupboard. She was depositing duvets and removing a bag of sun cream and an exercise machine as she managed the transition from winter to summer.
Her unit was neat – house proud even. She even had installed a wine rack and a clothes rail, on which outfits were carefully hung.
“My flat is so small, I need the extra space,” she said. She pays £160 a week for a single room in a shared flat, but it is better value to rent this storage for £120 a month than find a bigger home.
She is one of more than 300 people for whom the Cricklewood depot, managed by Gareth Wood, has become an essential adjunct to home.
Wood asks new customers why they are using the storage, but the answer is often simple.
“Do you live in London? That’s why you need storage,” he said. “ You don’t have a shed or a spare room. People are just trying to declutter and are making space.”
New flats going up in the area mean more business. A Matalan is about to be knocked down and replaced with an apartment block and “as soon as that goes up I imagine there will be a big need,” Wood said.
Patricia, a live-in domestic worker, rents a small £162-a-month unit in the facility because she says her boss doesn’t allow her to have many possessions in the house.
“This is my home,” she said, indicating the yellow door of her storage unit. “It’s an important place for me. I know people who sleep on buses and keep their clothes here. That’s happening here in this country.”
Behind another steel door, a writer has turned a unit into a library while Ivan Arvay, 42, originally from Slovakia, has filled his unit with wooden wine crates that he turns into furniture as a hobby. He simply doesn’t have room in his studio apartment.
“It is [crazy],” he agrees. “In Slovakia even in a studio flat you have storage in the cellar but here there is no storage at all.”
Businesses account for around one in five customers. Among those at the Cricklewood Space Station is Nalia Echchen, 34. She uses three units for her Amazon-based retail business selling Moroccan textiles, under the brand Maroccanity, and Pokemon figures and other toys. Boxes of toys teeter over a desk and computer she has installed in one corner – effectively turning the unit into an office as well as a warehouse. She has hung a map of the US to remind her of the road trip she one day hopes to enjoy if business thrives.
“I started selling from home and when I had too much stock, I used storage,” she said, as she worked on orders alongside her assistant, Mariana Repeti, 28.
Echchen spends £1,500 a month on the units but she has developed a business that turns over £400,000 a year. It may not be glamorous, but it is effective.
Self-storage is not just booming in the major cities. Rental returns have been increasing in all regions apart from the south-west and operators are expanding in places such as Slough and Northampton. And the uses are extremely diverse.
In Coventry, Ross Morris, who used to work in a self storage facility said there were several men fixing motorbikes and car parts in some units and a DJ practising in another, “the deep thud of bass often emanating from his container”. At a certain point a team of builders rented a unit, filled it with rubble, stopped paying the rent and were never seen again.
“A heroin addict was once living in one,” he said. “We cleared his container of needles, a single mattress, a camping stove and a giant bag of pasta. Not sure how long he had been living in there. Containers have been raided by the police on multiple occasions. Drug dealers operating out of them and people storing illegal cigarettes. There is almost no limit to what people use them for – from every walk of society.”
Kevin Prince, who runs the Space Station chain, recalled a run-in with one customer.
“I had a really difficult customer who was quite rude and arrogant, never paid on time and always gave me a hard time,” he said. “And then he just stopped responding at all.”
After a couple of months not paying rent Prince cut the customer’s lock off and found the unit empty. The customer had removed all his possessions, but “in the middle of the room was a 4ft inflatable penis”.
“I think I knew what he was saying to me,” said Prince.
Tee, a software engineer who lives in an adapted Land Rover, partly due to expensive rent, said he believes “storage is a powerful tool in allowing people to live tiny”.
He uses it to “change the contents of the Land Rover depending on what I’m doing”.
If he’s going hiking he’ll deposit his bike and hot water shower and pick up his hiking gear.
“I have about four or five different configurations of my mobile home I can choose from because I have storage and can swap items in and out,” he said.
Meanwhile, Jo, 54, an education manager in Brighton, who could not afford £1,200 a month rent during Covid said she hired an £80-a-month Big Yellow unit for her belongings and saved money sofa-surfing and using Airbnbs for two years. Returning to normal renting after the pandemic she missed “going back to the Big Yellow looking at all my stuff in one place”.
“Now it’s all distributed again, it doesn’t have the punch,” she said.
