A storage company has come to the aid of a youth movement that’s bounced back to pre-Covid levels of activity.
The Urdd, Wales’s biggest organisation for children and young people, runs 100 clubs for 20,000 members in North Wales and has had to ramp up its storage capacity for all the equipment and supplies it uses.
Organisers have turned to Lock Stock, Wales’s biggest self-storage company, and now their belongings are kept safely in storage units at sites in Bangor and Wrexham.
The Urdd, 102 years old and with over 50,000 young people on its books nationwide, has a busy schedule of artistic, social and sporting activities and events including stays at Urdd locations.
Simon Thomas, the Urdd’s Community Officer for Eryri region, said:
“We cater for thousands of young people across Wales and so we need a lot of equipment and supplies so it makes sense for us to store these items.
“The units are easy to access and while some things may not be needed often, when we do need them we need to be able to get our hands on them straight away.
“We carry lots of arts and crafts materials and sporting equipment and our offices would just be impossibly cluttered if we had to keep them all there so instead we have storage units at sites across North Wales.
“We organise so many events and activities at our clubs and there’s always something happening every half term including discos and events at schools all over Wales.
“In the Eryri region which covers half of Gwynedd we have over 20 clubs and across North Wales there are over 100 with thousands of members so we need to store a lot of stuff.”
Lock Stock’s North West Wales Area Site Manager Lee Hanson said:
“The Urdd is a great organisation and I remember going to their outdoor centre at Glan Llyn, near Bala, when I was in school and having a brilliant time.
“The Urdd have offices here in Bangor so it works well for them to store at our site on Euston Road where we have installed 10 and 20-foot units because they fit the profile of the site better than the 40-footers and it’s the same at Wrexham.
“We still have the same high-security fencing and there are electric gates with coded 24/7 access and it’s not just the units that are green either.
“We have used recycled surfacing and we are also using solar-powered lighting at many of our sites as part of our drive to be as renewable as possible while our insulated storage units are recycled too.
“The sites are conveniently located in the heart of the local community, we offer flexible deals so tenants only pay for the days they use the unit, there is no minimum term and we have recently introduced a Student Discount.”
Lock Stock, founded in Denbigh in 1999, is the UK’s largest containerised storage company with almost 4,500 units providing over four million cubic feet of space at 29 storage parks across North and Mid Wales and the border counties.
The organisation boasts sites across North Wales from Holyhead across to Flint as well as sites across the border in the likes of Huyton in Liverpool, Newtown in mid-Wales and Shrewsbury, Ludlow and Craven Arms in Shropshire.
The company estimate that 60 per cent of their containers are rented by people moving house or keeping treasured possessions but up to 40 per cent, almost 2,000 of their containers are used by small businesses for storing materials.
Lee Hanson added:
“Businesses, especially small businesses use our sites because they have storage needs and with three different sizes of units they’re ideal whether people are looking to grow or to downsize.
“We adjust to demand and if it is from an area where we need more capacity then we look at opening somewhere new or extending our existing premises.”
