Ready Steady Blog

When and where did self-storage arrive in the UK?

As with many new ideas that originate in the USA, self-storage was exported to the UK around 10 years later and so it was with self-storage. During the early 1980’s, a few low grade facilities started to appear in and around London in poor quality buildings, mainly situated at the rear of industrial estates. Some stores appeared on main roads following the property crash on the early 1990’s but these were opportunity led and few and far between.

All those companies that start with the letter A

The early UK self-storage operators mainly had names that began with A, such as ABC, Acorn, Abacus, A1, Apex and Aardvaark as they competed to be at the top of the self-storage section in the Yellow Pages which was the primary means of marketing self-storage throughout the 1980’s and into the 1990’s.

The new wave for a new millennium

The UK self-storage world changed in 1998 when Shurgard Self-Storage arrived from the USA and the Big Yellow Self-Storage Company was formed in the UK. Both focused on the Greater London area initially. This new wave of development brought modern, multi storey self-storage buildings with 24 hour access pin codes and a sense of customer service.

Other new names appeared such as Safestore and Access self-storage but these substantially started out as a consolidation of existing 1st generation stores; for instance, Acorn and Abacus were knocked together to form Access and Safestore acquired Aardvaark, Spaces and other smaller companies.

Both Shurgard and Big Yellow built their business cases around the visibility of the building to generate enquiries and the prospect for enquiries from Yellow Pages. As we all now all know, the growth of the internet has been phenomenal over the past 10 years and is now largely replacing Yellow Pages.

The coming of ReadySteady Store

Ready Steady Store was formed in 2005. The business model was to take the type of building that Shurgard and Big Yellow were building in London and the Home Counties and take the concept to the provinces.

At Ready Steady Store, we had the benefit of lessons learnt by Shurgard and Big Yellow in their roll out programmes over a 10 year period. As was clear from the early American experience, the possibility of  “cut off” by a competitor from the target market remains a serious potential threat. In the first wave of development we therefore sought to find sites that were high profile, as close as possible to the target markets and ideally, in solo trading locations, thereby reducing the chances of being “cut off”.