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International Storage Base |
in addition to a 25,000 sqft warehouse in Oldbury, the group had a warehouse in Maltmill Lane Halesowen and Station Road Rowley Regis and a large fleet of 40ft road trailers, so as the vast volumes of clearance stocks arrived from all over Europe, they were containerised and stored at the Storage Base in Providence Street (now known as Self Storage Midlands), and the factory units that had once formed part of the chain making and foundry industry, were refurbished to give us warehouse storage space desperately needed to process the scores of containers that the Stock group was exporting weekly. |
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Providence street was very quickly turned into the hive of activity that it had seen back in the early turn of the century when it was then heavy industry,by now it was a continuous fleet of 40ft trailers and containers arriving daily and a continuous fleet of trailers and containers departing on a daily basis, the storage of vast volumes of merchandise using shipping containers was born, and the viability proven as the most efficient way to store goods cheaply and efficiently by the Stock Group. |
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Introduction Of Container Rentals |
In the early 1990s the Stock Group was approached by local companies and businesses wishing to rent containers, and as the Stock Group could manage aerial containers to store goods in just as easily as ground level containers, it was decided to introduce container rentals and thus, the concept,Self Storage Midlands was born. |
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Modern Times |
Through out the 90s and into 2000 the Self Storage Midlands Cradley Heath storage base has remained very popular with local trades people and businesses, and we go for long periods of time with full occupancy and on occasion a waiting list, but as we are introducing a lot of long term rentals in the air, using aerial containers, a few more ground floor units are becoming available to rent, however the Self Storage Midlands staff will do everything possible, to accommodate new renters.
We guess being in the Black Country makes us somewhat sentimental about the past, as we see more and more people and companies suffering because of the recession that seems to be manifesting, but we have seen it all before, and the area of Cradley Heath has had more than its share of hard times, so in true Cradley Heath fashion, we will all weather the storm
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The Fivepence a square foot Concept materialised |
Modern container shipping celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2006. Almost from the first voyage, use of this method of transport for goods grew steadily and in just five decades, containerships would carry about 60% of the value of goods shipped via sea.Often these days the self-same construction is being used to manufacture containers for storage of goods, moveable on land as on sea, ideal on land because they can go to a location and remain there to save offloading the content in one go, the container can be dropped with content for slow release of content, for what ever application.
The idea of using some type of shipping container was not completely novel. Boxes similar to modern containers had been used for combined rail- and horse-drawn transport in England as early as 1792. The US government used small standard-sized containers during the Second World War, which proved a means of quickly and efficiently unloading and distributing supplies. However, in 1955, Malcom P. McLean, a trucking entrepreneur from North Carolina, USA, bought a steamship company with the idea of transporting entire truck trailers with their cargo still inside. He realized it would be much simpler and quicker to have one container that could be lifted from a vehicle directly on to a ship without first having to unload its contents.
His ideas were based on the theory that efficiency could be vastly improved through a system of "intermodalism", in which the same container, with the same cargo, can be transported with minimum interruption via different transport modes during its journey. Containers could be moved seamlessly between ships, trucks and trains. This would simplify the whole logistical process and, eventually, implementing this idea led to a revolution in cargo transportation and international trade over the next 50 years.
So we adopted the use of shipping containers as storage containers, a cheap easy and safe way to store items, keep them serviced well and weather tight and they made ideal storage units, in the infancy of Stock plc we had need to store vast volumes of stock, several millions of garments, for us 64,000 sqft of container storage represented 130, 000 sqft of warehousing, we discovered cheap, efficient, safe storage methodology, our business changed direction and some of the management took a more back seat and relaxed approach and diverted from trading to offering cheap storage, as recession bit hard and many businesses such as our own had to scale back a need for cheap storage was adopted, the thought of paying 5p a square foot per week was unthinkable, but we had found a solution, workable for those who needed it most , those who stored long term and in high volume, and needed good security thus www.fivepence.info was born and that concept was adopted by 21E.Limited . |
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