Fred Wright runs a bird-fancying business from his unit. Less spit, but lots of sawdust, in units 2400 and 2410 on the ground floor of Access Self Storage in Croydon. These rooms are leased by Fred Wright, an early adopter who moved his home-run operation selling bird-fancying equipment into a self-storage unit in the mid-1990s.
Thousands of entrepreneurs and small business owners have done the same since, and businesses now account for a third of the UK industry’s rented space.
“I’d outgrown the garage,” says Wright, 61, “and I didn’t want to be working from home all the time.” He moved his stock – cages, seed, mountains of sawdust – to a space in a former Timex watch factory in Surrey.
Then, this year, he was offered the chance to be the first to move into a newly built facility in a retail park off the A23; the site manager, a pal, had the perfect allotment in mind – adjoining rooms in a prime locale beside the loading bay door.
Wright was delighted. “Imagine this much seed in my garage!” he says, pointing at the plastic sacks that are stacked from floor to ceiling. There’s Buckton’s Budgie Tonic, Clark’s Squeamer Feed, and, passed over as if it were some little thing, Fred Wright’s Exotic Bird Mix, made to his own recipe.
On the shelves are water feeders, food feeders, nest pans, nest felts and literature, too – a budgie handbook that Wright penned 20 years ago. Tucked underneath all this is a box of Union Jack car flags – “Totally unrelated”, says Wright. “I got stitched up at auction there. I just love to deal, buying something for 50p and selling it for 80p. My accountant always says to me: ‘I hope you’re enjoying this, because you aren’t earning enough to warrant the rent on the units.’ But I love it.”
A little creative blinkering when it comes to the cost of self-storage is not uncommon – the rolling rent to harbour, say, an unwanted sofa will quickly top out the expense of junking the sofa and buying anew. “The vast majority of people have a need for storage temporarily, at odd times in their life,” says Paul Glenister of the Self Storage Association UK (SSAUK), a group set up to protect the interests of this quickly fattening industry.
“But, increasingly these days, we’re getting long-term, continuous users. We call them lifestyle customers.” Wright’s unit in the Timex factory had been in continuous use for more than a decade. He was happy there, but the building had “looked a bit like a workhouse” and he suffered unruly neighbours – a limousine crew whose unit was filled entirely with magnums of champagne.
The new facility is more spacious, the neighbouring rooms as yet empty, and he can let his business spill out into the corridor if needs be. Occasionally he brings customers here. “I try to be open for visitors twice a week,” says Wright. “We’re a fragmented community, bird fanciers. I like people to know that if they can’t find something, they can always come to Fred.”
Written by: Tom Lamont for The Observer, Sunday 29 November 2009
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