Self-storage units are springing up across London at a record rate as the city's housing shortage becomes more acute.
London's self-storage sector has nearly doubled in size in the last decade, according to property consultancy CBRE, with an area the size of Hyde Park now dedicated to lock-up units.
Oliver Close, a senior director at CBRE, said: "It is a new sector in the last 25 years. It feels like enormous growth."
The rapid expansion has been blamed for stalling housebuilding in the capital . Rob Perrins, the chief executive of Berkeley, one of the biggest housebuilders in London, said Big Yellow Group – one of the largest providers of self-storage in London – had become his "biggest competitor" for land.
While self-storage has expanded rapidly in the last decade, the number of new homes sold by private construction companies in London each year plunged by 84pc between 2015 and 2025, according to Molior, a data company.
Self-storage units have traditionally been used for one-off events, such as house moves or renovations.
However, families are increasingly turning to self-storage as part of their lifestyle, said Simon Loveridge, the chief executive of Rafter Group, the fastest-growing private self-storage operator in Europe.
As the shortage of homes in London becomes more extreme, it is driving a wave of demand for units as households turn to units to keep belongings that will not fit in their homes.
Mr Loveridge said: "That is probably the fastest-growing cohort. That has increased by 20pc over the last two years. We are seeing that continuing to increase, and the age of people using storage is getting younger."
The shift to homeworking during the pandemic drove new demand as families made space for home offices, he said, while the rise of smaller-scale online businesses has also driven commercial demand as people look for places to store their stock.
Rafter Group is the parent company of Attic Self Storage, which opened four units in London in 2025 and has three in the pipeline this year. One of its new developments sits underneath a Barratt development in Bermondsey.
Self-storage developers are increasingly outcompeting residential property developers because they are more nimble and are not subject to the same requirements to build affordable homes.
Attic Self Storage outbid residential developers in a couple of cases last year, primarily because they were not subject to the same planning requirements as housebuilders, Mr Loveridge said.
Mr Close said self-storage developments were also benefiting from backing by private equity, pension funds and sovereign wealth funds. He said: "It feels as though everybody is in a scramble to try and expand their portfolios."
Industry growth in London
There is a record 15.9 million sq ft of self-storage across London, up from 8.6 million sq ft in 2015. The current total is an area larger than Hyde Park, though the storage space is spread over multiple floors, so it does not necessarily equate to land use.
Self-storage is a tiny fraction of London property development compared with residential buildings, but it is growing rapidly.
Ollie Saunders, the head of self-storage at Savills, said: "We could definitely see the size of the industry doubling probably in the next 10 years."
There are 239 self-storage facilities open in London, with another 45 in the pipeline, according to Savills.
The amount of storage space per person in the capital will rise from 0.12 sq m to 0.15 sq m over the next three years, taking it to nearly twice the current UK average of 0.08 sq m.
Mr Perrins told The Telegraph this week: "The Government needs to prioritise housebuilding land and not allow Big Yellow to buy all the land, because London will have no [new] homes, fundamentally, if we carry on as we are."
Steve Reed, the Housing Secretary, and Sir Sadiq Khan, the London Mayor, have launched an emergency package to boost housebuilding in the capital.
Until October, 35pc of the homes in any new London housing development had to be affordable. This has since been cut to 20pc to raise construction starts.
