October 2023. Out of nowhere, our external warehouse partner dropped the bombshell: they were downsizing. Translation — “Please remove your 300 pallets of stock as soon as possible.”
Three hundred pallets. That’s roughly the same as someone saying, “Move a mountain by Friday.”
At Merit House on Stanhope Street, our warehouse and office were already operating like a game of Tetris on expert mode. Containers arrived, pallets stacked, narrow walkways shrank by the day — but somehow, we always managed to squeeze one more in. Until that day.
When I finally sat down to do the math, the numbers felt surreal.
To hold all 1,500 pallets comfortably, I’d need around 20,000 square feet of warehouse space, plus another 3,000 square feet for offices — a total of 23,000 square feet. At the market rent of roughly £10 per sq ft, that’s a £230,000 annual rent.
That figure was about four times what we paid at Merit House. Painful, yes — but still, compared with the £2.5 million or more it would cost to buy and build such a site, it almost made sense.
Then I discovered something worse — something that quietly crushes thousands of British SMEs every year.
The real weight wasn’t the rent. It was the business rates.
Next Chapter: The Real Burden That Crushed UK SMEs
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