What Boris thinks about Self Storage
Lok’nStore Business & Household Self Storage spotted this article by Boris Johnson.
When Tutankhamun popped his clogs, there really ought to have been someone in his entourage who harboured doubts, deep down, about what they did next. It was all very well to mummify the kid, but I wonder whether anyone stopped to ask whether he was really going to need all that clobber.
I mean all the gubbins they left him for the afterlife: the cash, the bows, the baffling board games, the hunting dogs, the mouldering jars of ancient Egyptian tucker, the untwanged harps and the boats that never got wet. Was there some secret rationalist at the court of the pharaohs?
It seems unlikely; because all the evidence is that the Tutankhamun instinct has never left our species. Indeed it seems to be growing every year.
We may think the Vikings were crazy to inter their warriors surrounded by polished axe heads and saddles and sacrificed thrall girls and horses chopped up so as to fit in the tombs. But if you want evidence of how human beings still define themselves and their status by their possessions – regardless of whether they can actually use them – then drive out of any big British town or city.
There on the perimeter, vast and growing, you will see the cuboid buildings of the self-storage industry. These are monuments to democratic capitalism. They are a system that allows anyone – not just the kings and the pharaohs – to have his or her own pointless treasure house of immortal possessions. They are a testament to our deep reluctance to let go.
Like so many consumer phenomena, the self-storage industry began in the US, and in the past four decades its expansion has tracked the growth of GDP. With every upwards lurch in per capita spending power, with every technological obsolescence, human beings have been acquiring more and more stuff.
We are now collectively running out of space to shove it. In the past five years self-storage has exploded across Britain, and experts in the field put it down to all sorts of things. There is the cost of housing, and family breakdown, and students moving things to and fro. But above all there is the sheer growth in the quantity of objects, and the sentimental attachment we have to them. “There’s a huge amount of stuff that’s never used and never collected,” says someone familiar with the business, and a lot of it arises when Granny dies.
No one can bear to throw her treasures away. There again, no one particularly wants them in their own home. The result is storage. Every year it grows.
We can’t quite bring ourselves to junk the ashes of our childhood pet, sealed pharaonically in an empty tin of Quality Street, any more than we have the guts to scrap that old wooden Dunlop Maxply, because we delude ourselves that the time will come, in some future existence yet to be organised, when an old wooden tennis racquet will be just what we need.
But if you want an idea of how the market is going to grow, look at America, where they have 57,000 such self-storage hangars. Already the average American has 7 sq ft of self-storage space, compared with 0.4 sq ft in Britain.
If the self-storage industry keeps growing at this rate, the day is not far off when we will all be Tutankhamuns, trying to cheat death with a secret funerary display of all the things that are most personally suggestive, most symbolic of our lives, and the things we couldn’t bear to chuck.
The full article appears in the Daily Telegraph
