Why Londoners Need Storage

The Shrinking Homes Report

London homes are the smallest in England. England’s homes are the smallest in Europe. And the average London flat hasn’t stayed still while that ranking held. It’s kept shrinking, down from 61.4m² in 2013 to 60.3m² in 2023, according to Nationwide’s analysis of English Housing Survey data. This isn’t a subjective complaint about cramped living. It’s a measurable, worsening shortfall in floor space, tracked year on year by the ONS, the English Housing Survey and Nationwide.

That shortfall is what this report sets out to quantify: how small London homes really are against the rest of England and against Europe, which boroughs feel the squeeze hardest, and why the trend is still moving in the wrong direction. At Alexanders Removals & Storage we store what doesn’t fit into homes like these, but the data below is the actual starting point, not us.

The numbers behind London’s space crunch

Start with the headline comparison, because it sets the scale of everything that follows. England has the smallest average home size in Europe: 71.2m², against 108.2m² in Italy and 92.7m² in Germany, according to the Find Me A Floor study. That’s not a marginal difference: the average Italian home is more than 50% larger than the average English one.

London doesn’t sit at that English average. It sits below it. Homes across the capital average somewhere between 78m² and 84m², depending on the survey year and methodology, which makes London the smallest region in England by floor space, smaller than the North East, smaller than Yorkshire, and smaller than anywhere else on the ONS’s regional breakdown (ONS / English Housing Survey).

Then there’s the borough-level detail, which is where the averages stop being an abstraction and start looking like a lived reality. The City of London has a median home size of around 47m². Bromley, at the other end of the capital, sits close to 97m², more than double (ONS admin-based floor space statistics). Two boroughs, one city, and a gap wide enough to fit an entire second flat inside.

And it’s not static. Flats, the dominant housing type across inner London, have been getting smaller, not larger, over the past decade. Nationwide’s analysis of English Housing Survey data found the average flat shrank from 61.4m² in 2013 to 60.3m² in 2023. A full square metre gone, in a housing type that was already the tightest on the market.

Here’s how London’s own headline figures stack up against each other before we go further:

London isn’t just tight by national standards. It’s tight by a national standard that is, as the next section shows, already the smallest in Europe. That’s the compounding problem people don’t always consider.

How London compares to the rest of England

London is routinely assumed to have the priciest housing in England. Fewer people clock that it also has the smallest. Those two facts are related: floor space costs money, and London land costs more than anywhere else. But the outcome is a city where residents pay the most per square metre for the least amount of square metre.

Against the English regional average, London’s 78–84m² range puts it below every other region tracked by the ONS and the English Housing Survey. The North East and Yorkshire and the Humber, regions with far lower average property prices, offer noticeably more floor space per household. It’s a genuinely odd inversion if you think about it in pure economic terms: the region with the highest incomes and the highest demand has, per home, the least room to put anything in.

Part of this comes down to housing mix. London has a far higher proportion of flats than the rest of England, and flats are structurally smaller than houses: there’s less scope to extend, less garden to build into, and a ceiling imposed by the building’s own footprint. But housing mix doesn’t explain all of it. Even London houses tend to run smaller than their equivalents in other regions, a function of Victorian and Edwardian terrace stock built for a very different pattern of household life than the one Londoners live now.

How the UK compares to Europe

Zoom out further and the pattern gets starker. The Find Me A Floor study’s comparison places English homes among the smallest in the developed world, not just the smallest in Britain:

We’re not going to pretend we know every driver behind that gap. Planning regimes, land value, build traditions, household formation patterns and post-war reconstruction choices all played a part across different countries, and untangling them properly is a job for economists, not a storage company. What we can say is what the number means for anyone living in it: an English household, on average, has noticeably less physical space to store belongings, host guests, work from home or simply spread out than a household in most of the rest of Western Europe. And London households have less again than the English average.

Borough by borough: where the squeeze is worst

The City of London and Bromley sit at the two ends of London’s range, but the middle of that range tells its own story. A sizeable share of London boroughs cluster well below what would be considered an average English home elsewhere in the country.

To put that in context: Brighton & Hove, at 78m², is the smallest local authority outside London by median home size, according to the ONS. It’s a useful yardstick precisely because it isn’t in the capital: it’s what “small” looks like once you leave London’s boundary.

And yet 45% of London’s boroughs have a smaller median home size than Brighton & Hove. Not a handful of outliers in Zone 1. Nearly half the capital.

That statistic does more work than almost any other figure in this piece, because it reframes what “small” actually means in a London context. If Brighton & Hove represents the floor for the rest of England, London pushes below that floor across roughly half its boroughs. Inner boroughs, including Islington, Camden, Tower Hamlets, Hackney, Westminster and the City itself, sit toward the smaller end, shaped by dense Victorian terraces subdivided into flats and newer high-density developments built to tight footprints. Outer boroughs, including Bromley, Havering, Bexley and Sutton, sit toward the larger end, where semi-detached and detached housing stock from the interwar and post-war suburban expansion still dominates.

The practical upshot: where you live in London doesn’t just affect your commute or your council tax band. It roughly halves or doubles the amount of physical space you have to work with, depending on which side of the city you land on.

Why it’s getting worse: flats shrinking further, not less

This is the part of the story that should worry anyone hoping the squeeze is a temporary blip. It isn’t. Nationwide’s analysis of English Housing Survey data shows the average flat fell over the past decade:

A decade of measurable shrinkage, in the housing type that already dominates London’s stock and already sits at the smaller end of the size scale.

A single square metre doesn’t sound dramatic written down. In a flat already under 65m², it’s a meaningful share of usable space: roughly the footprint of a small home office, or a decent-sized walk-in wardrobe, gone from the average new-build or converted flat over ten years.

Several forces sit behind that trend, and none of them are going away soon. Land values in London have continued to climb faster than construction costs can offset, which pushes developers toward maximising unit count over unit size. Permitted development rights have allowed some office-to-residential conversions with minimum space standards that critics argue sit below what’s genuinely liveable. And the National Described Space Standard, while it sets minimum floor areas for new homes, is a floor, not a target. Plenty of developments build close to the minimum rather than comfortably above it.

The result is a slow, steady tightening. London wasn’t spacious to begin with. It’s now measurably less spacious than it was a decade ago, and there’s no strong reason in the current data to expect that curve to bend the other way.

The historical picture: how space standards have changed

It’s worth remembering that this wasn’t always the plan. Post-war housing policy in Britain, particularly following the 1961 Parker Morris report, was built around the idea that homes should have enough space: specific minimum standards for room sizes, storage and overall floor area, tied to household size. Parker Morris standards shaped council housing for decades and, for a period, pushed the conversation in the opposite direction to where we’ve ended up.

Those mandatory standards were scrapped in 1980, and space provision was left largely to the market and to local planning discretion for the following three decades. The National Described Space Standard, introduced in 2015, reintroduced minimum floor areas, but as an optional standard that local authorities can choose to adopt, not a universal requirement. Many London boroughs have adopted it. Some development still slips through under permitted development routes that sit outside its scope entirely.

The net effect over sixty-odd years is a British housing market that briefly had space minimums it doesn’t reliably enforce today, layered on top of London-specific land pressures that make every square metre expensive to build. Homes got smaller not because anyone decided smaller was better, but because the guardrails that once stopped them shrinking were removed and never fully replaced.

What Londoners are actually doing about it

None of this is news to anyone who’s actually tried to fit a life into a London flat. What’s changed is how people respond to it.

The Self Storage Association UK, in its Annual Report produced with Cushman & Wakefield, has tracked steady growth in self-storage take-up across the UK for years, with London consistently among the strongest-performing regions for demand. That’s not a coincidence sitting alongside the space figures above. It’s the market’s own answer to them. When floor space is scarce and expensive, storage becomes one of the few ways to expand a home’s effective capacity without moving house or extending a lease.

Here’s a genuinely useful way to think about it. If your flat runs close to the London flat average of around 60m², a storage unit doesn’t need to be enormous to make a real difference to how that space feels and functions day to day.

A small unit, broadly the size of a large wardrobe, will typically hold the contents of a box room: seasonal clothing, sports equipment, a few boxes of documents or keepsakes. A medium unit, closer to the footprint of a single-car garage, comfortably holds the contents of a one or two-bedroom flat’s worth of furniture during a move or a renovation. A large unit can hold a full three-bedroom household’s furniture and boxes. Visit our Storage Space Calculator to find out how much storage you would need.

Set against the borough figures earlier in this piece, the maths becomes fairly direct. Someone in a 47m² City of London flat freeing up even 4–5m² of storage-cupboard-equivalent space through an off-site unit is recovering roughly 10% of their entire home’s footprint for actual living. In a market where that same square metre would cost several thousand pounds a year in rent, storage is very often the cheaper way to solve the problem, not the only way, but a genuinely rational one once you look at the figures side by side.

FAQ

Why do Londoners need storage more than people elsewhere in England?

London homes average 78–84m², the smallest of any English region, and flats, the capital’s dominant housing type, have shrunk from 61.4m² to 60.3m² over the past decade. England already has the smallest homes in Europe, at 71.2m² against 108.2m² in Italy. London sits below even that reduced national average, which means the gap between what people own and what their home can physically hold is wider here than almost anywhere else in the country.

Which London boroughs have the smallest homes?

The City of London has the smallest median home size at roughly 47m², with several other inner boroughs also running well below the London average. Outer boroughs such as Bromley, at close to 97m², offer more than double the space. Notably, 45% of all London boroughs have a smaller median home size than Brighton & Hove, which at 78m² is the smallest local authority outside the capital.

Are London flats getting smaller or has this always been the case?

They’re getting smaller. Nationwide’s analysis of English Housing Survey data found average flat size fell from 61.4m² in 2013 to 60.3m² in 2023. Space standards briefly existed as mandatory minimums after the 1961 Parker Morris report but were scrapped in 1980. Today’s National Described Space Standard is optional for local authorities, which leaves plenty of new development building close to the minimum rather than above it.

How much storage space does a typical London flat owner need?

It depends on what’s being stored, but a small unit, roughly wardrobe-sized, usually covers seasonal items and boxes for a one-bed flat. A medium unit suits furniture during a move or renovation. As a rough guide, recovering even 4–5m² of storage space from a small City-of-London-sized flat can free up around 10% of the home’s total footprint for everyday living.

Is self-storage cheaper than a bigger London flat?

Usually, yes, particularly in inner boroughs where rent per square metre runs highest. Extra space through a bigger flat costs considerably more per square metre annually than a comparable storage unit, since storage doesn’t carry London’s premium for location, transport links or amenity. It’s not a substitute for a home, but for excess belongings rather than daily living space, it’s typically the more cost-effective option.

Sources: ONS, Admin-based statistics for property floor space, England and Wales; English Housing Survey, Size of English Homes fact sheet, gov.uk; Nationwide Building Society analysis of English Housing Survey data, 2013–2023; Find Me A Floor study on European home sizes; Self Storage Association UK / Cushman & Wakefield, Self Storage Annual Report.