Space Station Brand Guidelines: A Former McLaren Manager’s 1983 Colnbrook Store

A Formula One team manager opens a storage yard.

Space Station began in 1983 at Colnbrook, near Slough on the western edge of London, the company says. Its founder was Alastair Caldwell, and Inside Self Storage, the trade publication, gave the same founder and founding year when it reported on the company in October 2021 and December 2022.

Before storage, Caldwell’s career was in Formula One. English Wikipedia says he joined McLaren as a mechanic for the 1967 Italian Grand Prix, rose to become the team’s manager from 1974 to 1978, moved to Brabham in 1979 and to the German ATS team in 1981, and then, having decided against starting a racing team of his own, left motor racing to set up a self-storage business. The company’s timeline dates that decision to 1982. Its about page puts the weight on the 1974 to 1976 seasons, when James Hunt drove for McLaren under Caldwell’s management, and describes the storage business as building on his focus on performance. English Wikipedia adds that he was a technical adviser on Rush, the 2013 film about Hunt and Niki Lauda.

For its first two decades the company grew store by store in West London and the Thames Valley, along the M4 corridor, according to its own timeline. A second store opened in Chiswick in 1986. In 1988 the company bought an old railway yard at Brentford station and converted it for storage. Isleworth followed in 1992 and Slough in 1997; Slough became the head office. A store in Uxbridge, in West London, opened in 2006.

From 2009 Space Station also ran stores on behalf of other owners. The timeline names Lockaway in Swiss Cottage, North London, as the first managed facility to join the group that year, followed in February 2015 by managed stores in Kings Heath, in south Birmingham, and St John’s Wood, in North London. Further management contracts followed in Cricklewood in 2018 and Solihull in 2020.

Heitman, Birmingham and a historic works.

The ownership changed in October 2020, when Heitman, a real estate investment manager founded in 1966, acquired Space Station, Inside Self Storage reported in December 2022. The company describes the deal as the start of a new chapter and says Heitman’s investment has driven its expansion programme. Kevin Prince has led the business as chief executive through that period, according to the same publication’s reports from 2021 onward.

Acquisitions came first. In 2021, the company’s timeline says, Space Station bought two independent operators: Rent-a-Store in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, and Squab in Daventry, Northamptonshire. In October 2021 Inside Self Storage put the network at 12 facilities in England; by December 2022 it reported 13, with three new Birmingham stores, at Castle Bromwich, Hall Green and Stirchley, planned for 2023. The same report said Space Station had taken on the management of Fort Locks in Banbury, an independent store of about 18,600 square feet in 214 units, which was to be rebranded under the Space Station name.

The building programme followed. The timeline records the three Birmingham stores opening in 2023; Wakefield, Garretts Green Lane in Birmingham and a managed store in North West London in 2024; and Godalming, in Surrey, and Handsworth, in Birmingham, in 2025, the second of which it says took the company to five Birmingham locations.

In April 2026 Property Week reported that Space Station had opened its 19th UK site, in Stafford, inside the former Bull Hill Electricity Works, a local landmark since its construction in 1895, where Siemens Brothers started a business in 1903. The new store spans more than 55,000 square feet, the paper said, and Prince told it he hoped local people and businesses would like “how we’ve modernised this historic building.”

In June 2026 Inside Self Storage reported that Space Station, then operating 20 facilities in England, had refinanced and enlarged its senior loan with PGIM, the investment business of Prudential Financial, to fund acquisitions, development and investment in its existing stores. The company’s website now groups its stores into three regions: Birmingham and the Midlands, London and the South East, and Yorkshire, where it lists Doncaster and Wakefield.

How storage operators present themselves.

Self-storage is a property business that has to sell itself to people at a moment of change: a move, a renovation, a smaller home or a growing stock of inventory. The way operators present themselves follows from that. The building is the first advertisement, and cladding, roll-up doors and roadside signs can all carry a brand colour. Where a company publishes its building colours or signage system, this guide reports them as the company’s own description.

Online, the category has settled on a familiar set of tools. An operator’s website can lead with a store finder, a unit size guide that explains what fits in each space, a choice of unit types such as heated or drive-up storage, packing supplies and an account page for paying rent and booking. When one owner runs several regional brands, those sites can share a single template, with only the name, the city list and the colours changing, as StorageVault’s Access Storage and Sentinel Storage sites did in November 2026.

Campaigns and characters do the work the buildings cannot. Some operators use mascots, slogans or sports sponsorships to make a functional service memorable; StorageVault, for example, took stadium and broadcast signage with the Toronto Blue Jays in 2023, according to Inside Self Storage. When a guide mentions a mascot or campaign, it says where and when the company used it.

Behind the shop front sits a corporate layer. Some operators are listed companies or real estate investment trusts, or are owned by private-equity firms and family groups, and their investor pages explain store counts, rentable area, acquisitions and listings. Those figures are given here only as a dated source states them, and mergers or takeovers that have not closed are described as pending, with the date they were announced.

Free removals, a box shop and solar roofs.

Space Station’s website leads with plain service language rather than with its founder. Its home page offers “easy and convenient self storage,” an instant online quote, a calculator titled “How much space do I need?” and a free removal service into a new unit, subject to the company’s terms; Inside Self Storage noted the free moving service for new customers in 2021 and 2022. The site also lists humidity control, keyless entry, staff on site every day, a box shop and DHL Express parcel drop-off points in its stores, and offers a virtual tour of its Garretts Green store in Birmingham.

The personal-storage pages are organised around moments in a customer’s life rather than unit sizes: moving house, renovation, student terms, travel, long-term storage and furniture. Business pages cover archive, retail stock, warehouse and container storage, and many stores also rent out office space, according to the site.

The company’s environmental programme is a large part of its public face. Under a campaign it calls Going Green, the company says solar panels are installed at most of its sites and provide around 430,000 kilowatt hours of energy a year, that its corridors use LED lighting on motion sensors, and that its shops sell boxes made from recycled cardboard. In March 2025 Inside Self Storage reported that the campaign set a target of carbon neutrality by the end of that year, and that staff had funded the planting of 1,872 trees through the OnHand app, which rewards small everyday actions. The website credits its design to Tuch Design and its build to Pentangle Technology.

For a design guide, Space Station shows how a regional operator can carry a founder’s story on its about page while keeping its storefront practical. Compare Big Yellow and Safestore, two other UK operators. For this guide we use a deep blue, pale concrete and a signal green with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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