Smilers scrap metal merchants, Atwood Road (2011)

Garages are an endangered species, locally and across London. Where once council flats would have had rows of garages below – often beloved of British spy and detective dramas where exclusively bad stuff happens – new developments are mandated not only to have bicycle storage, but also to be car-free, meaning garage-free too.

Free-standing garages and similar small industrial buildings are being demolished for housing, and as we’ve experienced locally, offices too.

The car is next on the endangered species of course, and current bogeyman of every level of government and social media alike.  One can only wonder when the car is completely green, producing no emissions – tailpipe or otherwise – running on tyres made of waste plastic designed to shed no particulate matter, what will the Twitterati and government have to berate us old dinosaurs with?  Don’t laugh – it’s only a decade or so away.

Lest we disappear down that rabbit hole, let’s focus on garages, and why they might be important for a range of socio-economic reasons, not as just car storage, which few ever used them for anyway. The site pictured above is from our 2012 collection of 50 favourite places, and true to form, was redeveloped soon after and became the location of a Nancye Goulden Award of 2015 – with not a garage in sight.

We are reminded by last week’s Last Word that Sidney Alford, the maverick explosives expert who created methods of defusing the terrorist’s preferred weapon – the Improvised Explosive Device – started in a garage. Locally, Shepherds Bush, to quote our follower @sbcalling …nowhere else on the planet has a richer history of rock & roll, TV, film and pop culture than Shepherd’s Bush, White City & Hammersmith, and where the NME has claimed one rock star to every 1,222 of the population, may have significantly benefited from garages.  Many an act has started in one, often for practice, away from others, making as much noise as they like, there’s a plethora of terminology relating to garage bands, a garage rock genre and so-on.  It certainly worked out for locals The Who, punk icons The Clash (Garageland) and the maverick Sex Pistols, with Danny Boyle’s new drama Pistol filmed last week in The Cross Keys, 45 years on.  Not much more than a glorified garage at the time, the laundry behind the 2009 award-winning 22 St Peter’s Square, AKA Island Studios, became rather significant to a huge swathe of the music industry in the 1960’s and 1970’s as Chris Blackwell’s Island Records.

Maybe no longer to your taste, but while pondering a misspent youth fixing cars in parent’s garages, including a less-fondly remembered side-line of garage rock, think of the economic benefits of garages:

Steve Jobs Garage

• Apple Inc., was started by Steves – Jobs and Wozniak – in a garage. Now worth $2,100,000,000,000 – the most valuable company in the World.
• Jeff Bezos started Amazon in his garage, Now worth $1,700,000,000,000 – the second most valuable company in the World.
• Bill Gates and Paul Allen started Microsoft in a garage, close behind at $1,600,000,000,000.
• Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google in a garage, now worth $1,000,000,000,000.
• Bill Hewlett and David Packard started their enterprise in a modest garage at 367 Addison Avenue, Palo Alto – now worth $9,000,000,000.  It’s clearly worth only $9 Billion, because it was only a single garage, though Walt Disney did OK from his single garage too.
• 

  Sipsmith Distillery: 27 Nasmyth St [Photo: Horton & Garton]

  Proving that being in the USA and the world of technology isn’t a pre-requisite, Brewdog is a recent Scottish garage success, now valued at nearly £2,000,000,000. They even have a bar in the aforementioned ‘Bush.

• Finally, and a lot closer to home, the now well-known Sipsmith gin distillery only started in 2009 in a modest 500 sq.ft. garage in Nasmyth Street W6, and was sold for £50M just 7 years later. There are differing views around early sales, but the relative numbers above tell their story.

That totals over $6 Trillion, or about twice the entire UK GDP – we clearly need more, not fewer garages, preferably of the double variety, with power. So, before you convert your garage into another bedroom – as a quick scan of the streetscape and today’s H&F planning alert reminds us – remains a popular local sport, sometimes even sans planning, you might instead consider sprucing it up as a Covid-Recovery Incubator Space, and you could be onto a winner. As we’ve said many times in response to planning applications, the lack of amenity and similar space, particularly the derisory minimum afforded by the 1.5m x 1.5m balcony beloved of flat developers, is harmful in more ways than may be immediately obvious.