Q-Park is widely recognised for creating sustainable Mobility Hubs throughout its city-centre network of parking facilities. It comes to life through close collaboration with on-site providers who offer a range of services, all connected in one shared space.
We recently spoke with Ben Thilthorpe, Head of Operations at Vanguard, to discuss this partnership. Vanguard operates numerous branches across the UK with a strong presence in London, several situated within Q-Park Mobility Hubs.
Click here to watch the full interview.
Why did you choose Q-Park?
Car parking and self-storage are very similar it’s very much about location, and these central London locations were very important to us. Also, Q-Park is a quality car park provider, and at Vanguard we are a family run business, we’ve been operating since 1964, and we very much focus on quality.
What do you like about working with Q-Park?
The reason we like working with Q-Park is the people we deal with are very easy to deal with. From negotiating the lease, moving through the legals, to actually getting the store up and running; ongoing operations with the local team, the local management. They’re all very helpful and we work well together, so it seemed more like a collaboration.
When you’re looking to locate into a mobility hub, what are you looking for?
When we’re looking at locations for our storage facilities, they have to be in major cities, it’s about location. The people that we serve are very much the local community and the local businesses in this area.
How would you define a Mobility Hub?
The way I would look at a Mobility Hub for where we’re located, these central London car parks have car parking obviously, but then you can charge your car, you can store your goods if you live local, you can store your goods if you’re a local business as well. You can pick your goods up, you can take deliveries, you can even have last mile deliveries run from these mobility hubs as well. There’s lots of reasons why these car parks can be multi-functional use not just a car park, things have changed now. These are great locations to be able to offer the local businesses, and local community lots of different services.
What affect has this mobility hub had on the wider community?
It’s had a big impact on the wider community because previous to this, self-storage was normally out of town, there wasn’t any self-storage facilities certainly in central London. So, if you require storage in central London, you generally have to try and move your goods out of town. There’s certain retailers that want to be close to their goods as well, so self-storage in central London has really worked for us because there’s a lot of people now benefiting from having quick access to their goods, whether it be their own personal items, or their stock for their businesses.
How did you find building a self-storage in a car park?
Building a self-storage business within a car park does have its challenges, unlike self-storage outside of London in big large sheds where it’s very easy to build a self-storage facility you have to deal all the different aspects of it being a car park. It means that you have to work with your builders very closely to see how we can actually fit the self-storage facility within the car park, because if you see it now and if you came here, you wouldn’t know that it was a car park. It’s very much trying to fit around the workings of the building, it’s doable but it does face challenges.
How does Q-Park help you deliver the best possible service?
We really like working with Q-Park, Q-Park are a quality brand, and they provide a quality product. It was really important to us that when we put our name to another brand that when our customers come in to the car park they feel the quality of the car park itself, and we know it’s going to be run properly; it reflects on our store as well.
What are the benefits of having a self-storage facility in a city centre?
Residential properties are at a premium, an extra bedroom is at a premium price, an extra store room is at a premium price, so we can provide an extra bedroom, an extra store room for these residents and for these retail providers at a fraction of the cost that they would pay for if they were above ground, on say Oxford Street for example.
Could you introduce this operation to other city centre Mobility Hubs?
Yes you could introduce this to other city centres, but it needs to be a big city centre, it doesn’t work in smaller towns, or smaller cities. For car parks to work with self-storage it has to be a major city centre where space is a premium within that city, and if you’ve got a city like that, it will work.
To find out more about Q-Park Mobility Hubs click here.
About Q-Park
Q-Park is a leading off-street parking infrastructure owner and operator with well-managed commercial parking facilities across seven western European countries. We operate off-street parking spaces we own, have under concession or with long-term lease contracts from public and private landlords. We focus on off-street purpose-built parking facilities at strategic locations. We operate more than 5,300 parking facilities comprising over 1 million parking spaces in the Netherlands, Germany, France, Belgium, United Kingdom, Ireland and Denmark. Based on publicly available industry data for our competitors, we estimate that we are a top three player, based on the estimated off-street revenues, in all the countries in which we operate. Q-Park also has numerous mobility hubs which provide access to a variety of mobility solutions. We house and support a range of activities from last mile logistics, electric vehicle charging, micromobility and car sharing services which help support urban accessibility, sustainability and liveability.
