Changing Living Patterns Have Influenced The History And Pattern Of Storage

Ever since human beings stopped roaming the land as hunter/gatherers

, settled in communities and started acquiring possessions they have needed to develop methods and places of storage for both household goods and for products and raw materials for trade.

Farmers used barns and outbuildings to store everything from livestock to machinery, feed and harvested crops.

In the home in the days before refrigeration there were a wide variety of methods for preserving and storing food, from pickling and conserving fruits and vegetables in brine, oil, vinegar etc using stone or glass jars as containers to storing root vegetables in cellars, sheds or gardens in clamps made of earth and straw.

Canning arrived with greater industrialisation and urbanisation, and gradually as people grew less of their own food, relying more on shops, the need for warehousing also grew.

As merchant trade spread across the globe particularly along the Chinese Silk Route, the camel caravans of Arabia and the near east and the seagoing traders from the Mediterranean Ports, specialised areas and buildings were needed.

In 1557, for example, a Portuguese crew is recorded as landing at Macao, near Hong Kong. On the pretext of drying out storm-damaged goods they put up sheds, which gradually became permanent portside warehouses, which in India and Sout East Asia were called godowns.

Many of India's ports and cities started life as trading posts, complete with dockside warehousing as the British, Portuguese and French set up trading companies.

The first British East India trading post, known as a station or factory, was set up at Surat on the West Coast (Bombay Presidency) around 1612 and the second at Fort St. George (Madras Presidency) 1640. Bombay was leased to the company by Charles II who had acquired it as part of Catherine of Braganza's dowry in 1662. The mouth of the Ganges was known as Kallikati (Calcutta) and here Fort William was established around 1665.

The East India Company spread its influence, establishing Fort Marlborough (Bencoolen) in Sumatra. For a time this was a Presidency in its own right controlling other factories along the west coast. There were other factories at the Prince of Wales Island (Penang), Singapore, Malacca, Java, Borneo, Celebes, Siam (Thailand), Persia (Iran) and the Persian Gulf, Macao and Whampoa (China). St Helena was settled by the East India Company in 1659 and was held and administered by them until the island was handed over to the Crown in 1836.

Throughout history, therefore, warehouses became a common sight close to any port or dockside and, as rail and canal networks developed, in city districts. Nowadays, of course, they can be anywhere, although the ports are still crucial for delivery and processing of goods shipped in containers.

Thanks to its infrastructure including a well-connected canal network, railways and later the Manchester Ship Canal, the City of Manchester, for example, was in an ideal position to receive incoming raw materials and had a large workforce to process them plus the means to distribute the finished goods. It was, in many ways, the warehouse of the western world.

So the city built warehouses - many of them - architecturally elegant pioneering buildings which often belied their purpose. They were also the first buildings to incorporate large scale commercial use of cast iron frameworks - then a revolutionary new and untried material.

By the late 20th century as distribution patterns changed and the docks and railways lost their pre-eminence, industries were moving out of town and city centres to purpose-built industrial estates and many of these old warehouses were taking on a new lease of life as apartment buildings.

The practice of renting car garages for general storage developed the U.K when, after the 1940s and 50s it became popular to build rows of garages near housing developments.

POpulation growth and changes in living patterns, however, have led to smaller living spaces and increased the demand for family storage fcilities outside but still close to the home.

Out of this has developed a whole new industry of offering units of space rented for the purpose, allowing the renter sole access, around the clock.

This has contributed to a new view on the urban landscape, the proliferation of self-storage rental facilities on the edges of towns throughout the UK, Europe and the USA in particular.

Copyright (c) 2010 Alison Withers

by: Alison Withers

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