The United Kingdom is now home to as many self-storage facilities as it is McDonald’s restaurants, according to research undertaken by the staff of self-storage comparison website Storage.co.uk. By manually searching the websites of facilities represented on their site, the researchers found there are at least 1,189 operating self-storage facilities in the country, compared to exactly 1,200 McDonald’s locations.
 
Facilities included in the count provide the accessible storage of customer’s goods, either in outdoor metal shipping containers or an indoor warehouse that has been divided into units. Companies that provide only house-removals storage were not included. 
 
Storage.co.uk staff has also surmised that since not all self-storage companies have a website, the actual number of U.K. facilities is likely higher then their estimate.
 
The Self Storage Association of the United Kingdom (SSA-UK) had previously estimated there were approximately 800 U.K. facilities. Most of the additional sites discovered through the new research are, according to a press release by Storage.co.uk, small-scale container storage firms that do not belong to the association, as well as a small number of independent warehouse firms.
 
According to Storage.co.uk, the SSA-UK believes an average storage unit to measure 80 square feet, and an average independent firm to have 311 units. Using these statistics, the facilities uncovered in the recent research represent more than 9.5 million additional square feet of self-storage in the United Kingdom, putting the total at approximately 40 million square feet, or 0.66 sq ft per person.
 
Storage.co.uk, a new website for people interested in renting self-storage space, provides a storage finder, how-to guide, videos and blogs. 

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