Once human beings stopped roaming the land as hunter/gatherers and settled in communities they started acquiring possessions. Then they needed to develop methods and places of storage for household goods, 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 days before refrigeration in the home a variety of methods was used to preserve and store food, including pickling and conserving fruits and vegetables in brine, oil, vinegar and keeping them in stone or glass jars and storing root vegetables in cellars, sheds or gardens protected by 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. Of course, nowadays they can be anywhere although ports remain crucial for delivery and processing of container-shipped goods.
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 distributions had changed along with transport systems and methods with docks and railways losing their pre-eminence and businesses moving out of town and city centres to special industrial estates, so many of these old warehouses took 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.
Author Resource:
Consumer writer Ali Withers looks at the history of warehousing and storage, which goes back many centuries. But as methods of transportation and travel have changed so, too, have storage locations, and the reasons people use them and rented self-storage has developed dramatically.
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