Sign of the times: ex-Beatties store to become urban storage hub

By

Nigel TAYLOR

Published
Sep 2, 2022

Another prominent city-centre retail space bites the dust. Birmingham’s long-empty former Beatties department store is set to become an urban storage hub. Self-storage group StoreAway will open within the 60,500 sq ft vacant space on Corporation Street.

​Built in 1955 for department store C&A, the space been vacant since 2006 and will now offer 650 lockers across three floors, opening 5 September.

And this is no one-off.  StoreAway also plans to “repurpose” more than a quarter of a million sq ft of unoccupied retail and leisure space across the country into convenient storage, The BusinessDesk reported.

Managing Director of StoreAway Richard Lanyon said: “The new store sits in a prime location in UK’s second largest city and is in the perfect place for our facility to thrive due to it being right on the doorstep of our many different types of customers that we know this service will be of benefit to.”

StoreAway also has a flagship unit in Liverpool opened in May and it opened in Cheltenham in June. Further sites have now been confirmed in Bath, Basildon and Swindon, with their associated openings expected later this year and early in 2023.

As the pandemic devastated an already struggling department store sector, the last few years have seen a host of flagship city-centre stores close with many remaining empty and still awaiting their fate. While some have been repurposed into smaller units, others have been tuned into housing or public buildings.