Real Storage Wars Business Boomers

Hello Matthew, it's Natalie calling from Lok'nStore.

What have you got going into storage?

This is a story of powerful forces at work in Britain today.

Our burning desire to have and to hold...

Check that out.

We'll keep this for our son in particular,

he may have a use for something like this.

Our reverence for relics preserved from our past...

Can't throw away a didgeridoo. It's not good karma, man.

And our relentless quest for freedom and space in a crowded land.

There's no room for the humans, so something's got to go.

These are the forces

that are feeding the gargantuan self-storage facilities

that have sprung up across Britain.

For a nation with more and more belongings -

and less and less space to stash them away -

self-storage is becoming a way of life.

For many, self-storage is even a place of work.

Obviously we'd like a window.

Maybe a balcony.

And for a generation of canny entrepreneurs,

this is an industry that's offered surprisingly rich pickings.

I felt like I'd come into the kitchen

and there was a briefcase of £20 notes

sitting on the table that nobody else could be bothered to take.

The business is booming.

Britain has by far the biggest self-storage industry in Europe.

Should we be worried?

The fact that we have such a large self-storage industry

in this country is a sign that we are a sick society.

MUSIC: "Star Wars (Main Theme)"

Space.

For Dave Bailey, it's an epic battle.

The loft is bulging. The shed's bulging.

The summerhouse was bulging.

Three kids, two adults, two dogs, and then the best part of 20 statues.

There's no room for the humans.

Something's got to go.

And the kids wouldn't leave, so I had to move it into storage.

With a collection of dozens of life-size Star Wars figures

and a host of other sci-fi paraphernalia,

Dave has found self-storage essential

to the pursuit of his passion.

It is a labour of love.

It's taken a lot of time to get it all together,

and fortunately places like this exist

otherwise I'd have nowhere to store it,

and I wouldn't be able to collect.

How much are you paying each month, do you reckon?

Right.

That's a question.

I don't know off the top of my head,

because I've been here so long, it just happens.

Um...

But it's in excess of £400 a month.

Probably most people think I'm barmy...

but it's that or it goes.

If I sold it...

I don't know what I'd do with myself.

I'd have a load of money, but I don't know.

Would it make me happy?

Nah.

No.

Dave is one of Britain's most dedicated self-storage users.

But most of us aren't overrun with house guests

from a galaxy far, far away.

So why have so many of us become hooked on self-storage?

Let's face the facts. We love buying things.

In recent decades

we have become voracious purchasers of mountains of stuff.

We have got much more stuff on average than our parents did.

We've got, by weight, about six times as much stuff.

If you add up all our furniture, our clothes, our TVs, our possessions.

It's a lot more.

Every year we manage to buy £3 billion-worth of toys

for our children.

Every year British people buy 7.5 million kettles.

This enormous boom in shopping for stuff has been made possible

because - since 1960 - household incomes have nearly tripled.

At the same time,

we have been deluged by a wave of cheap imports from around the world.

The reason that we are acquiring more more quickly

is that things are more affordable.

Production costs are so much lower.

Globalisation has enabled organisations

to adeptly globetrot in search of cheap labour costs.

You can buy a pair of jeans for £3, a T-shirt for £1.

How can it be - how has it come to pass

that we can buy a T-shirt for £1?

It's a conveyor belt.

Raw materials are being dug up from the earth,

constructing things people think they need,

and currently are sent in this particular direction.

And in case our hunger for stuff ever diminishes,

there's a whole industry persuading us to keep on buying.

About 2% of our GDP is spent on advertising

whereas the rest of Europe is about 1%.

This has an effect.

Advertising works, it encourages us to buy things

so we buy more than everybody else in Europe.

We end up with more in our houses than everybody else in Europe

and we end up storing more than everybody else in Europe.

With six times more stuff than the generation before us,

and only so much space, sooner or later, something has got to give.

Welcome to the world of self-storage.

Our problem isn't just that we buy too much stuff.

It's worse than that.

It seems that once we've got stuff, we are determined to hang onto it.

And this is where it often ends up.

15 square foot room.

-Wow, yeah.

-Small, isn't it?

Yeah, but is it in the catchment area of any good schools?

HE LAUGHS

A 15 square foot unit like this costs around £80 per month.

-All right?

-Yeah, that sounds great.

-Very good.

Shut door.

Today, British people spend nearly half a billion pounds a year

renting empty space like this.

Yeah, there's one room right down the end that we can have a look at.

As manager of a 1,200-room Big Yellow store in South London,

Gemma Szpala has come to suspect that there are powerful emotions

bubbling beneath the surface of the storage boom.

People find it really hard to get rid of stuff,

so they think, "Out of sight, out of mind,"

but they still have it.

I think there's a lot more hoarders in life than we actually think.

I suppose people think, "That might be worth something in the future.

"Not now, but in the future it might be an antique."

So people just want to hold on to stuff.

The myth which is perpetuated is that we live in this throw-away society -

I just don't buy that argument.

I think we have really important relationships to our objects.

They are meaningful. They're the ways that we narrate our lives,

and our life stories.

It's this all too human tendency towards hoarding

that means the UK now boasts as many self-storage sites

as branches of McDonald's.

Bob Stansfield, helped by his friend Charlie,

is just getting started in storage.

He's planning to use it as a stopgap measure

in between house moves,

and he's prepared to fork out £300

rather than reduce his mountain of treasured belongings.

This stuff is my memory box essentially,

of just little bits and pieces.

I haven't got room or time or space, for all this rubbish.

Hang on - whoa, whoa, whoa! Are you calling this rubbish?

The thing is it all has sentimental value.

It's cars that I've previously owned and I've kept bits off,

the surfboards I had when I was travelling round Australia,

the skateboards when I was a kid.

You can't throw it. It'd break my heart, you know?

Didgeridoos.

You can't throw away a didgeridoo.

It's not good karma, man.

Bob's encounter with storage is intended to be a brief one.

But all too often, that can turn into a long-term commitment.

Judy Emms first began to use Safestore in West London

when she moved to a smaller house.

Now she is one of the estimated 40% of customers

who have kept their belongings in for more than three years.

These would have been in our garage, for instance.

This has become our garage.

Our garage.

We've got bits and bobs of stuff that I can't get rid of yet.

Check that out.

My husband got that from a Soviet soldier in East Berlin.

And I showed my husband and I said, "Can you say goodbye to this yet?"

He said, "Oh, no, I can't say goodbye to that! That's special."

And it is pretty special, actually.

Just down the corridor,

Seymour Popek is desperately struggling

to bring his £109-pound a month storage habit to an end.

My wife has decided it's time to save money and get rid of it.

Two bags like that, old science fiction books.

I've collected those since childhood.

And I've got a couple of hundred

which I haven't got any room on my book shelves for any more.

But it's still hard to get rid of stuff.

They become part of you in some ways, don't they?

They become part of you.

It's a way of putting it away

and closing the door and saying, "I'll get back to that."

And you don't.

I'm being honest. You don't.

But often you do, but you've got to be in the mood.

Unless you're forced to by circumstances like, er...

you're dead.

The vast majority of stuff that we store in self-storage places

we do not need - we should either sell it or throw it away.

We're bonkers.

We're not idiots - I don't think we're idiots.

I think consumers get a bad rap, actually.

We're not idiots to hold on to these things,

it's just really quite practically difficult

to know what to do with them.

So how did we end up like this?

Just three decades ago,

the British self-storage industry didn't even exist.

To see how it evolved,

we have to travel to the home of stuff - America.

In the 1960s, Mad Men ruled America.

They sold dreams to a newly wealthy population.

Stuff was crowding out American homes.

Soon a nation was drowning in its own belongings.

It's not in the least bit surprising

that the whole trend towards storage started in America,

the first country to have vast quantities of stuff they didn't need

but define themselves through these possessions

so they needed storage space, and they started it.

And it started here,

in Odessa, Texas.

It was in this quiet backwater

that the global fight-back against the invasion of stuff began.

Its leaders were Russ Williams and Bob Munn.

In 1964 they opened A1 U-Store It, U-Lock It, U-Carry the key.

Odessa is an oil town,

and Russ and Bob thought oil workers would use their facility

to store their tools during seasonal downtime.

They were surprised when instead of wrenches and pipe grips,

their first customers showed up with sofas and toasters.

The self-storage story had begun.

But when baby boomers in the UK

started to share the American trouble with excess belongings,

we made do with a distinctly British solution.

MUSIC: "The Sweeney Theme"

How much?

27 grand, I make it.

I make it beautiful.

In 1970s Britain, those of us with a surplus of stuff

were forced to venture into the seedy underworld of the lock up.

Today, one man dominates the private garage business,

owning a portfolio worth £100 million.

His name is Rodger Dudding,

but to his many clients he's known as Mr Lock Up.

In the early '70s, Rodger was already a pioneering entrepreneur,

having successfully introduced ticketed queuing systems

to the nation's delicatessen counters.

But he was hungry for more.

His next move would make him the first member of an unlikely club -

the storage millionaires.

Reasoning that people would always need places to store their cars,

he set about building his vast empire of lock up garages.

Always one of the fun things is to find them,

to winkle-pick them out,

to find these garages hiding behind blocks of flats,

which a lot of people don't realise

that they are living there, as it were.

My policy was to drive up and down streets,

see if I could find any garages there,

then try to find out who the landlord was

and then make him an offer he couldn't refuse to buy from him.

Rodger's offers were SO hard to refuse

that he bought over 12,000 garages.

Most were used for cars,

but one day he noticed a puzzling new development.

Well, here you'll find a typical example of a lock up garage

which is no longer used for parking a car,

but is the ideal self-storage unit.

The change probably started to move around about the 1970s.

Typically, if you take a car from the mid-'60s backwards,

then unless those cars were garaged

or had a tarpaulin put over them at night,

damp wouldn't allow you to start the car very easily in the morning.

ENGINE STRUGGLES

But with the improvement of the technology in motor vehicles,

vehicles can stand outside in the open -

therefore garages stopped being such a necessity,

therefore what's an alternative use is use it for self-storage

of that widely used term, "stuff".

But Rodger's lock ups have played host to activities

far more exotic than hoarding.

We've just about, I think,

found everything in our career with lock up garages,

from the very sweet and very useful afternoon nookie shops...

WOMAN MOANS

..as they are discreet,

and much larger than a caravan and more stable,

and they can be decorated out, which they often are.

WOMAN SCREAMS

We've had several bodies, murders,

as they're an ideal dumping ground if you want to dispose of a body.

But the ideal place to dispose of a body

might not be the best resting place for our domestic knick-knacks.

For many, the lock up was just too scary to solve our storage needs.

But help was at hand,

and it came from a Briton on holiday in America.

Los Angeles, 1977.

A British businessman named Doug Hampson

was taking in the sights and sounds of California

when he saw something that set his heart racing.

One day I was driving down a road called La Cienega

and I suddenly saw a building that said public storage

and appeared to be rows of lock up garages

surrounding an old warehouse building.

And I thought, "I don't know what this is, but it looks interesting.

"I'm going to stop and check it out."

Doug had stumbled upon an outpost

of the flourishing American self-storage industry.

For an ambitious young entrepreneur,

it was hard to imagine a more perfect business to get into.

It was very basic.

Nobody lived in them, there was no plumbing,

and what you had to do to keep your customers completely satisfied

was very little.

And I thought, "This is a pretty good idea."

When he returned home,

Doug Hampson and his wife wrote the first chapter

in Britain's proud self-storage history.

The year was 1979.

The place was a quiet street in Central London.

This building here, we rented it from the London Electricity Board

and it had been disused for a number of years.

It was green with mould on the outside and even greener inside.

The rent Doug paid for the space was 60 pence per square foot,

but he found he could charge his customers

up to ten times that amount - and they were happy to pay.

They just said, "You know, this is fabulous, it solves my problem,

"I've been looking for this for years. Thank you very much."

The only thing that seems to be missing

on my visit to the storage centre today is a blue plaque

telling people that this, in 1979,

was the start of self-storage in Europe.

Doug Hampson's gift to Britain was a new place to store our stuff.

His gift to British entrepreneurs

was an ingenious way of making pots of money

from some very unpromising ingredients.

The self-storage business was a sort of alchemy.

The raw materials were the disused factories

and abandoned warehouses that littered '90s Britain.

For the first generation of self-storage entrepreneurs,

these remnants of our industrial past

were the perfect homes for our domestic clutter.

When we used to make stuff for the rest of the world

we needed mills to make it in, which are big empty buildings,

and we needed the warehouses to store it in.

And now we're not making hardly anything for the rest of the world,

we still have the spaces.

And spaces can store the stuff that we're buying in

from the rest of the world.

So, we've replaced manufacturing with buying junk

and then we stored the junk

in the buildings where we used to manufacture.

One of the early masters of this art was Andrew Jacobs,

founder of the Lok'nStore empire

that stretches from Eastbourne to Northampton.

Today they are building a brand-new store in Maidenhead.

But the company didn't start in bespoke buildings.

Some of our early stores were a parachute factory,

we got an air conditioning factory,

we got a furniture factory...

So, the business at that time was really about -

take these old buildings and, for us, paint them orange.

Put some units in and get some income out of them

where nobody else could really see

how to get an income out of that property.

The new self-storage industry cleverly exploited

the intricacies of the planning system.

The price of land depends on what planners say it can be used for.

The most expensive, especially in the south-east of Britain,

is residential land.

Land for retail generally costs less.

And land for industrial warehouses is cheaper still -

around half the price of retail.

What the self-storage pioneers did

was take the cheap land designated for warehouses,

but use it to generate the healthy income

you'd expect from a retail site.

One of those who achieved this feat

was opera singer turned entrepreneur Susie Fabre,

the owner of the A&A Self-Storage chain.

What you'll find is we picked up buildings that people didn't want,

had no use for, and the object of the game was to turn the building around

and get a good rental income.

But first, the would-be self-storage boss faces a problem.

Unlike in retail, opening day is a bit of a damp squib.

When you open up a self-storage facility,

you are making zero on day one.

From the moment you open those doors you've got an empty building

and you've got to get, you know, bums on seats, effectively.

Till you hit about 70%, and then you feel, "OK, I can relax now!"

To get new stores to that happy state as fast as possible,

the self-storage bosses have a secret weapon.

We do introductory discounts at most of our stores.

It's usually four weeks free.

The reason is because most of our customers

believe they're going to stay a relatively short period

and underestimate how long they're going to stay.

Once your customers have come in and stored their stuff

they have to act to stop doing business with you,

so the inertia is all in the right direction.

Do you think sometimes when people are in, they...

they forget they're in?

Ooh!

Do I? Well, yeah, I think they do forget they're in,

I hope they forget they're in.

And as they sit back and collect their rent,

the bosses don't have to pay too much out.

The buildings aren't heated, they're rarely lit

and they're not exactly overrun with people.

One of the attractions of the business

is we have very low staffing levels,

so we'll have a big store like this

that's providing 60,000 square feet of storage space

and it will have three or four members of staff only.

So, you know, across our whole business

we only have 130 staff.

It's quite hard to make a mess of this business!

Three, two, one...

THEY CHEER

Today the Lok'nStore team are opening their 24th site.

But just half an hour's drive away,

their arch rival is also building a brand-new store.

In 1999, a new company burst on the scene.

Its lavish marketing campaigns

cleverly played on all our worst fears

about the tidal wave of stuff engulfing our homes.

As your life changes,

keep hold of the things you love with Big Yellow.

Despite getting started five years after Lok'nStore,

today Big Yellow has almost three times as many stores.

This will be the 67th.

And like most of them, it will be enormous.

Before they got started,

self-storage sites on average were a modest 30,000 square feet.

Big Yellow doubled that, building 60,000 square foot monsters.

In order to build these gargantuan stores

they needed one vital ingredient - huge amounts of cash.

Something the earlier self-storage pioneers found hard to get hold of.

My now business partner Simon and I went round the City,

we tried to raise some capital we couldn't get any traction at all,

so people in the City and people in the property industry

really looked down on it

and thought it was a sort of lesser business, somehow.

Storage, you know...

it's not shopping centres,

it's not, you know, it's not hotels.

It's not fashion.

It doesn't seem, on the face of it, to be the sexiest of products.

But deep down,

the founders of Big Yellow knew that storage could be sexy.

Well - at least eye-catching.

With friends in the city, they were able to raise £75 million.

Not for this company the disused factories and warehouses.

They would construct gleaming new temples of stuff

in prime ring road locations.

40% of our customers are women,

and they don't want to be going to old warehouses

on the back of industrial estates.

The name and the colour scheme were designed to stick out.

The point about having main road buildings

is that it reinforces your brand 24 hours a day - as those cars go past,

people are seeing it. So when they then go on the internet

and they see you at the top of the free listings,

they see you second or third or first in the paid listings,

they recognise the brand and they click on it.

All the other self-storage companies did the same,

and soon our A-roads were dominated by massive garish sheds.

And the more people noticed them, the more they used them.

There's a stretch of road that we would travel along quite a lot,

and it just sort of screamed at you, "self-storage",

and it sort of, just... it fixed a problem.

The new self-storage industry was like manna from heaven

for one family in particular.

Dave and Alison Bailey now live a blissfully uncluttered life,

but five years ago things were very different.

-We had Princess Leia in the lounge.

-Yeah.

We had Darth Vader in the hall.

-We had Kung Fu Panda.

-Kung Fu Panda in the back garden.

Yeah. They were everywhere.

But self-storage changed everything.

It has been a...I wouldn't say it's a godsend, but it is.

You know, it really did help us out.

Because it is something he's passionate about.

How much does it cost overall?

Wow!

I wouldn't like to put a price on it.

I don't think about it, to be honest.

I always look very pale in the summer,

cos I've not had a holiday.

For Dave, the tensions between his intergalactic family

and his real one are coming to a head.

It's a luxury, and it's also an overhead.

And without that overhead, Alison can go on holiday.

We can have a nice car...

So if I can find another way of storing it

that doesn't cost me X amount of money each month

then that's what I'll have to do.

Thanks to customers like Dave,

the growth of self-storage in the 2000s was unstoppable.

During the decade, the area of storage space for hire

increased sevenfold, to a whopping 30 million square feet.

Between 2000 and, sort of, 2006/7, you know, you could build them

and these things filled up like clockwork.

And it felt like every time we opened a new storage centre,

we were instantly making money.

So we were trying to gather together as much money as possible

to open as many storage centres as possible.

What was driving this enormous boom?

In part, of course, we simply had more stuff that we wanted to keep.

But many of us also found ourselves with less space to put it in.

Like the Ward family of South West London.

This is the living room, so, erm...

with the dining table and the sofa.

And then this is my small but practical kitchen.

But the master bedroom is the kids' bedroom,

because they need more space than me.

Bathroom under my hanging laundry.

This is my and my husband's room, yeah.

There is always something that gets over-cluttered,

like these shelves.

We are four people living here, two adults and two children.

It's around 55/56 square metres.

And that's it, and no other storage whatsoever.

Before marrying her Scottish husband, Tone Ward lived in Norway.

When his job meant the family had to move to London,

Tone got a bit of a shock.

Norway is such a large country with hardly five million people,

so everybody has so much space there.

This flat in Norway would be a flat for a single person.

But they will have more storage.

They would have had some storage in the basement and loft.

We can't afford to move bigger.

To upgrade from this flat to something bigger

is not just the double it's the triple of the value of this flat.

Tone's story is typical.

Wherever we come from, increasingly if we want a job,

we have to head to London.

In the last five years,

80% of all new private sector jobs created nationally

were created in the capital.

In this crush, self-storage has thrived.

You're getting rates of overcrowding rising in London.

They have been rising now for 20 years.

Most of the population have seen themselves squeezed,

and the poorest people are seeing themselves really, really squeezed.

You're going to run out of space for stuff.

And with ever-rising house prices putting bigger homes out of reach,

growing families overflow into their storage space.

They're growing into their attics, they're growing into the spare rooms,

they're growing into the garages, having them converted.

When I was a child everything was in the attic,

all the junk and, and what have you,

and now it's moved into a self-storage unit.

As a result, a third of all UK self-storage is within the M25.

But it's not just a shortage of space that's fed its growth.

London is the chief city of an increasingly transient country.

People in the past

were more likely to end up sitting somewhere for, say, 25 or 30 years.

When they got the family home, they stayed in the family home

and they stayed in it after the kids had gone.

In the last ten years there's been this huge increase

in private renting.

In London the average time people spend in a private rented house

is a year, and that creates problems

about what people are going to do with their stuff.

To make matters even worse, just as our housing woes were peaking,

a trend for pared-back living and clean lines swept the land.

The pressures of interior design

are a set of pressures which have partly come through the media,

partly through kind of interior design programmes,

partly through offerings like Habitat and IKEA and so on,

to live this kind of minimalist, decluttered lifestyle

which is open to the view of others,

which reveals us to be orderly, ordered rational citizens

with immaculate taste, surrounded by beautiful things.

The reality of that, of course, is that behind the scenes

the situation is altogether different.

Under here I have my printer.

And under this chair I have my sewing machine.

And under here I have the school clothes for my two children.

Erik, my youngest son, is also active in golf.

I tried to squeeze them into the corner.

My husband have a luxury.

He have a double wardrobe by himself.

This is the second wardrobe and that is what I have for space,

and that is what me and Mia sharing.

They have individual boxes where

they're allowed to keep things and the toy they collect.

I really need to be strict on toys.

I think that is the next thing to go.

But despite fiendishly inventive storage and aggressive toy pruning,

last year Tone admitted defeat and rented an extra 25 square foot.

'I brought along some winter clothes that we need to store for next year.'

Oh, the lift is here.

'Because the things are too small, we give away to charity or friends.

'And also I was packing some ski clothes I have washed.'

Give me that one, Mia. Thank you.

But some of the belongings stashed away in Tone's unit reveal

that even the queen of decluttering isn't immune to getting

sentimental about her stuff.

CDs. I don't know why I am storing the CDs.

I think it's old technology,

but I'm not really ready to get rid of them yet.

Let's see.

Oh.

Is there anything here I can find for me?

Oh, yeah. Janet Jackson.

SHE LAUGHS

In the age of MP3s, there's no use in having these any more.

It isn't. I have to say, we are using Spotify now and we have

that on computer, we have it on the phones when you're out running.

So, yeah, this is luxurious, isn't it?

This isn't really need to be stored. You could get rid of it.

So, yeah.

-Do you think you will?

-I don't know.

Because of all these things.

I think my husband equally, like me,

can go through every single one of those ones.

And you remember which friends you was with, what you did that time,

and things like that. So it's almost like pictures, isn't it?

Music and pictures is hard to get rid of.

By 2010, self storage was so ubiquitous in America

it had even spawned a smash hit TV show.

TV NARRATOR: Get ready for this summer's biggest blockbuster.

The format hinges on what happens when American self-storage

customers fail to pay their bills.

Their goods are auctioned off.

Sold it right here - 200.

This is great. There's the 200 I paid for the locker.

For the buyers, the hope is that amid all the household junk

will be a life-changing find.

Hold the phone!

Back in Britain, the process for dealing with defaulters is

a touch more restrained.

For Frederic de Ryckman de Betz, owner of Attic Self-Storage,

today is clearout day.

The laws here are different to America's

and there is no public auction.

Even so, staff are keeping an eye out for items of value.

OK, breaking into unit 2072. The time is now 3:17.

'Now, in this situation, you have a customer that has not paid

'their rent for a period of time, and we can no longer get hold of them.

'And we need to empty the unit so we can rent it out to somebody else.

'The store manager will take a decision on

'whether these items can be sold on to try and reduce the debt.

'And if they can't be sold on,

'they'll either be given away to a charity shop,

'or we'll literally take them down the dump and get rid of them.'

Magazines, books, books...

We've got some tax returns here, payslips, things like that.

It's not a pleasant process.

You're going through the contents of their life.

Invariably, it's not anything that means something to us.

It's not items of value.

It's all second-hand stuff,

but it has sentimental value to the customer.

These are just generic suits.

No particular value.

They can be sold and we can make some money on those.

Assortment of ties.

The clearout is when the bonds between someone

and their beloved stuff have to be forcibly broken.

That's from Star Wars.

McDonald's cup.

This looks like somebody who has been collecting McDonald's toys

for some reason. There's quite a lot of these.

If there's quite a lot of these, then collectively they might

be worth something. There might be someone out there who's

interested and willing to pay something for them.

It's very far removed from Storage Wars

type of thing that we see on TV.

We very rarely find any items of value.

We never make our money back out of this process.

It's purely a process to empty the unit to stop the debt

accumulating for the client,

and to make sure we can put the unit back into use for other clients.

Jurassic Park box set.

All too often, one man's treasure is another man's junk.

From today's clearout, Fred recovered £300

against a debt of £1,530.

But in the last few years

a new type of customer has been fuelling the self-storage boom...

bringing with them stuff that might actually be worth selling.

The British high street is on its knees.

In 2012, 20 shops closed in our town centres every day.

The new wave of online retailers don't need shop fronts.

More and more often, when you order online, the budding entrepreneur

at the other end is operating out of a self-storage unit.

The Little Legs Children's Clothing company was founded in 2010

by Helen Cockle and Helen Gilbert.

Child-friendly, bright, interesting clothes that are just

a little bit different.

-Yeah, it's fun stuff.

-It's just not high street stuff.

So we're aiming to move things very much online,

grow the online side of things.

We're trying to become online experts at the moment.

We obviously don't have any computer here.

We do everything like that from home

and then come down on a morning and get the orders packed up.

I've always done self-storage.

I don't have a house big enough to have a spare room,

so it was the only solution.

It works really well.

It's bright, it's easy to use,

it's perfect for what we need.

Yeah, so it's great.

Obviously we'd like a window, maybe a balcony.

-THEY LAUGH

-But, no, it's brilliant.

It's like a second home.

For all its shortcomings as a place to work,

today 42% of all self-storage space is taken by businesses.

They are more of a hive of activity than you'd imagine. When you walk past,

you imagine it's people just putting in furniture in that they don't want and,

actually, they're not at all.

I think they're primarily little businesses,

and there's always something going on and there's always deliveries.

There's always all sorts happening.

And I think they are breeding grounds for brand-new businesses.

I started the business about ten years ago in my garage,

and I found a gap in the market for tools

and equipment for people to make chocolates at home.

And we promoted that on the shopping channels and then from there

people started asking me, "Well, do you sell to the trade?"

And, essentially, the company grew from there.

Michael Kamlish is the owner of the Home Chocolate Factory.

With 14,000 customers and ten staff, it's no longer a start-up.

But rather than get their own place, they work in a storage unit.

In here is where we have the UK's

biggest selection of chocolate moulds.

I think we have something like 2,000 to 3,000 different designs

of chocolate moulds. Even novelty products like this, for feet.

And this one here, which is used for making chocolate fruit.

We've got banana, strawberry, etc.

Through to what we believe is the biggest Easter egg

mould in the UK - this is 90cm high.

This side is more for pastry.

The storage units work as a showroom for customers, office and stockroom.

And thrown in is the use of a forklift truck.

I've moved from, you know, one unit to something like six or

several units within this particular storage location.

So, this one, we're about to move more products

from other units into this one.

So, we're just building on that. And then this one over here.

In this type of business, sometimes we have a big delivery

and we need space to store it, but only for a month.

So we will add space, as and when we need it, or we will lose

space, as and when we need it.

If we were to buy a unit which was 10,000 or 20,000 square foot,

it will either be always too big or too small for us.

So here we always ensure that, you know,

the storage fits our particular needs.

The space used by businesses is increasing 10% a year.

Most use it as a stockroom or temporary office.

But, within reason, once you've rented the space,

what you get up to in there is up to you.

And some customers have pushed that that idea to its limits.

Eager Kung Fu students from far and wide regularly make a pilgrimage

to Safestore in Reading.

The centuries-old art is passed on within the confines of what

in self-storage speak is a standard quadruple garage unit.

The class is led by Greek martial artist Loukas Kastrounis,

who was trained by a master with links to Bruce Lee.

We are not in the gym because gym has certain times to train.

Unfortunately, with today's life,

people working so hard and so unusual hours that's stopping individuals to

do their hobby, their fun, because of other commitments.

So here I'm open seven days a week,

and those seven days a week you can come and train at any time you want,

so that's why I'm here not in the gym. So, here...

I don't know what he's going to do.

Whatever Craig does...

I have to be there on time.

If I'm not on time, I wait for the ambulance.

'We become a big family here.

'This is my other family.

'And when they come here, they find it's relaxing cos it's normal.

'As you can see, the place is normal, yeah?

'Nothing to make or intimidate you.'

Some people, they told me before, it's quite interesting.

They say, "It reminds me of the old boxing clubs."

You know, the hidey one, you know.

The finishing touches are being put to the Big Yellow in West London...

but they've hit a problem.

The glory days of self-storage tycoons having

the pick of prospective sites are coming to a close,

according to Big Yellow boss Jimmy Gibson.

Getting hold of new sites now, particularly in the big cities,

is extremely difficult because the ability

to convert offices and brownfield land into residential,

that's been made easier and that has increased competition for land.

Having run out of land to build on, it's now much tougher to expand.

And if that wasn't bad enough, they've got another headache.

PRESENTER: Hello, we're LoveSpace.

We're a storage company with a difference.

We'll do the first test to make sure nothing is untoward.

Young web-savvy upstarts are trying to muscle in on their territory.

Site live some time between 12 and one, hopefully 12.

One hopeful is LoveSpace.

Today, overseen by managing director Steve Folwell,

they are launching their new website.

OK, so we're about half an hour from launch, everyone,

so we need to be ready to go as soon as we do launch.

So, Brett, what do you do?

I'm just testing for the bugs that won't be there.

LoveSpace is a storage by the box company,

and that means that we go to people's doors, we pick stuff up

that they want to store for as long as they want to store it for.

And we take it to our warehouse, where we look after it for them,

until they want it back,

and then we deliver it the very next day to them.

Armed with this simple idea, the start-up team believe

they have a crucial advantage over the established players.

One of the big challenges that traditional self-storage

have that we don't have is that they're

restricted by the locations that they can use.

They need to be at the edge of town, on busy roads that people

drive past the whole time,

and those sites are becoming much more difficult to find.

We have one big warehouse.

Because we go and collect from people's doors and transport their

things to our secure warehouse, it can be anywhere in the UK.

It means we pay lower rents, and we can also increase

the amount of capacity we have without really any restrictions.

-Right.

-We're live.

-We're live. Come and have a look.

Here it is.

-Fabulous.

-Well done, gang.

Well done. Well done.

But self-storage's old guard aren't ready to roll over and die.

Some of these ideas where you set up a website

and, you know, you send boxes and stuff,

it's removals and storage...but in archive boxes.

And, actually, the bit it misses

is the most convenient thing that people want is the privacy,

the security and the access local to where they need it.

So it's complementary, but it's by no means a threat.

I don't think people would perceive us as a threat yet to traditional

self-storage. But then again, I don't think

that necessarily HMV thought that iTunes was a threat

when it started, or Waterstone's, Amazon.

But it doesn't look like traditional self-storage will be going

the way of HMV quite yet.

It turns out that LoveSpace has a significant self-storage

habit of its own.

We do currently use self-storage.

We use very big rooms, so 1,000 square foot rooms.

It's a short-term solution for us,

using other people's self-storage. In the long term,

we're looking at our own warehouse capacity across the country.

So for the time being, as a new industry,

you are dependent on the old one a little.

We use the old one. We're not dependent on it in any way,

no more than a baker is dependent

on a particular brand of butter, I guess.

Ben Rogers and Shaff Prabatani have a competing vision for the

future of storing stuff, one that doesn't need grand buildings at all.

Their idea is a website called Storemates.

What we're suggesting is that you don't need to build another

tomb for unwanted possessions in these great big warehouses

when someone just round the corner might have some

space in their loft or in their spare room.

If you've got space, you can go online and offer it up for a fee.

For 15 square feet, it's usually around £40 a month.

Storemates will take 15% of that to cover insurance and their cut.

So what we do is match people who don't have enough space with

people who have extra space.

And people with the space can raise some money by renting it out

to people who are short of space in London.

Ben and Shaff want our stuff to return to its traditional home -

the attic - albeit someone else's.

Like Caroline's.

I have an enormous loft and when my partner Steven was alive,

he had lots and lots of newspapers up there.

He was a hoarder, not an uncontrollable hoarder,

but when he died I sent them all for recycling because they were

of no value, and cleared the space, cleaned it up, and it was empty.

I'm delighted because it's a little bit of pocket money for me,

and it fits into my general philosophy of lack of wastage,

make do and mend, reusing.

Maybe it's something to do with being a war baby, you see.

SHE LAUGHS

So up here in my loft we have one batch of stuff,

which belongs to Nick.

There's another lot back there that also belongs to him -

that's why he pays me twice.

Julie's is there and Nicky is the black boxes under there.

When people want to bring boxes, the only conditions I say are no drugs,

no food, because I don't want rats up here, and certainly no firearms or

anything dangerous or explosives.

And they assure me that it's domestic things

and perhaps collections of CDs and that kind of thing.

I trust them and they have to trust me.

I could go off with the lot down to the market and open a stall.

I could take it all to a charity shop.

I could help myself, but there's an element of trust

and I like the two-way feeling of respect for their belongings.

Are you ever tempted to peek inside their stuff?

I have never looked inside the stuff.

I've helped them bring it up,

so I sometimes open boxes I've seen and I think,

"Why does one want to keep that?" But that's their problem, not mine.

Before the self-storage industry came about,

people used to store with their parents, with their friends,

and people they knew, people they trusted.

Yeah, I suppose, in a way, it feels like people coming back to that

and the internet enabling people to find each other and use their space

and share things better. And it feels like it's a full circle, really.

Another person who's bringing his stuff back home

is Star Wars fan Dave Bailey.

The end is in sight for his £400 a month habit.

DOG BARKS Shush.

This is my solution to storage.

This is a shed that we've built, just so I can get some stuff

out of storage, try and save on money, really.

Not only that. If it's at the storage, you don't get to see it.

Whereas, if it's here, if I woke up one morning

and I want to play with a Dalek, I can go and play with a Dalek.

Or if I want to come down and look at Princess Leia,

I can come down and look at Princess Leia.

That just sounded wrong, didn't it? THEY LAUGH

Building this has cut my storage bill, probably, by about a quarter.

On this back corner, the garden goes back further,

so we're going to build another one there to hopefully bring over

what's down in storage, Star Wars-wise.

And then hopefully reduce it by another third.

That's the plan, anyway.

It has been three decades

since the first self-storage site opened in Britain.

The business is an emblem of our transition from a nation that

makes things to one that buys things.

But most of all, it's a story of how a very simple quirk of human

nature - our desire to hold on to stuff -

has spawned a fiendishly irresistible money-making machine.

I'm paying for space...

which, if you really think about it, is daft.

Because I'm paying for nothing apart from four walls.

It is money for old rope at the end of the day...really.

The Open University delves further into what makes these

businesses continue to boom.

If you would like to discover more, go to bbc.co.uk/businessboomers

and follow the links to the Open University, where you can

also take part in our online survey about your storage habits.