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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
There is a comforting theory that millennials and Gen Z are swerving the traditional purchases of adulthood because they prefer to access everything online. Who wants framed paintings when Art Basel Miami Beach will let you buy into the digital art craze by minting your own non-fungible token? And who needs a car when you have an Uber account? I was once even teased by a younger colleague for keeping credit cards in a wallet — something they compared to dragging a fax machine around on a night out.
Digital possessions and the sharing economy upended the old rules around ownership. Instead of buying things like cars, homes, clothes and desks outright, we can lease them from tech companies. Still, it’s not true that this has supplanted the impulse to keep physical belongings. For proof, look at the explosion of storage units around the world.
Roll up the metal shutters and you’ll find countless lockers stuffed with old furniture, bike wheels and boxes of books — a collection of ghost houses filled with things but no people.
This is the price we pay for cheap imported goods and high density, urban minimalism. The shift in behaviour is long term. That’s partly because the housing squeeze shows no signs of reversing and partly because temporary solutions can easily become a habit. If you’ve ever rented a storage unit you’ll know how addictive they become. These odd, liminal spaces allow you to tuck away the inconvenient parts of life on the outskirts of town and forget about it. Even when the bills roll in, it is tempting to keep delaying the hassle of collecting whatever was stored.
The UK has more storage units than any other country in Europe. Perhaps we’re a nation of packrats, but a Royal Institute of British Architects survey once found that we also fold ourselves into smaller homes than the rest of the continent. As houses shrink and more people live in shared, rented accommodation, self-storage units are multiplying. When I first rented one in 2018 there were 1,505 sites across the country. According to the Self Storage Association, that number has increased by almost 80 per cent to over 2,700, with 60mn square feet of shelf storage.
Growth — driven by both individuals and business — spiked in the pandemic. Occupancy at listed companies Big Yellow and Safestore has slowed since, but this is partly down to new supply (it’s not that hard to build more metal boxes).
Still, the fact that demand exceeds the level in a period as strange as the pandemic should be cause for concern. Storage unit use tends to rise during downturns, as living situations grow more precarious and businesses fold. As a recession indicator, it can be added to a growing 2025 list that also includes plummeting consumer confidence indices, diners financing cheap food delivery orders via Klarna and Gen Z’s penchant for baggy silhouettes (a variation on the hemline index).
That’s the rational explanation. Moving items into storage as the result of temporary economic hardship, relocation or bereavement makes perfect sense. What makes less sense is the decision many of us take to keep paying monthly bills for years in order to hang on to things we don’t really need.
The American writer Cat Marnell, a habitual storage unit user, calls them traps for disorganised people. That may be true. But they are also a testament to the power of physical belongings and the pain of losing them. When the literary critic Sir Frank Kermode lost half his book collection in the course of a house move (he mistook rubbish collectors for removal men) it was reported as an incalculable loss. No Kindle collection would warrant the same lamentation.
Paying to keep hold of stuff can be a way to delay the inevitable — such as selling a late parent’s furniture, for example. There’s a reason Marie Kondo was able to turn decluttering into an entire career. It’s the same reason Michael Landy’s artwork Break Down, in which he dismantled and destroyed everything he owned, from car to toothbrush, retains a grip on imaginations 25 years later.
Storage can also be a source of stability. Last year, the journalist Julie Pool wrote about her mother’s lengthy storage unit habit during the years her family bounced between hotel rooms. For her mother, she wrote, the unit was “her most fixed address, an extension of home”.
Digital repositories offer no such solace. Storage units are a promise to your future self that one day, life will be different. If the global economy falters further, expect their number to grow. A fixed address in a liminal space is better than no address at all.
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