Giant, gaudy warehouses sprout up across the land – and often we can’t even remember what we’re paying to keep in them.
It’s easily done. About five years ago, when we sold our house and moved into a rented cottage, we put half our worldly goods into storage. It was only a year later, when we had bought, moved into and filled up a new house, that we remembered we still had all those other crates and boxes full of… what? We couldn’t recall.
Some books and records, probably. Old copies of Country Life. That moth-eaten rocking horse that looked antique, but wasn’t. That gopping great modernist mirror we never liked. And what about that filing cabinet we lost the key for? Was that in there?
Well, it seems we weren’t alone. Since the craze for self-storage took off about a decade ago, some 800 vast, brightly coloured warehouses with fun-sounding names have appeared around the country – as many as in the rest of Europe put together. And the strange thing is that, according to a new survey, an increasing number of us are paying to store things – about £50 a month – and not coming back to collect them.
What is this about? One explanation is that we simply have too much of everything. It was telling that some of the recent looters couldn’t explain why they had taken items they neither wanted nor needed, not least because they already had them at home. Another explanation might be the growth of TV shows such as Cash in the Attic. We are reluctant to throw things out, or take them to charity shops, in case they one day become valuable (they never do, of course).
cont.
This article was published by the Telegraph on 3rd September 2011. To read the full article click the following link:-
