A woman whose self-storage unit in Highams Park was broken into says she fears it was an “inside job”.
In September, Shanida Osakonor found that 24 of her belongings had been taken from her unit at Shurgard's Hickman Avenue facility, with boxes left open, the Waltham Forest Echo reports.
The missing items included a sheepskin merino wool jacket worth £385, Ray-Ban sunglasses valued at £208 and a laptop worth £559. Those three items alone total £1,152. The other 21 included gifts she describes as “sentimental” and “irreplaceable”, among them a gold-dipped glass rose she was given for her 16th birthday.
“The incident has made me feel like there is a strong lack of accountability and duty of care on Shurgard's part,” she told the Echo. “I had trusted my items were safe, and the fact that these issues are not new shows that something is very wrong. I am upset as sentimental clothing and tech items have been stolen and I won't ever get them back.”
A similar case last year
The theft comes just over a year after another customer at the same facility reported a break-in. In August 2025, Highams Park entrepreneur Gary Rozanski found that a ceiling tile in his unit had been cracked in half. An Xbox, a Sonos speaker and two GoPro cameras were missing, and he also found expensive coats belonging to other customers inside his unit.
There was no visible damage to his door or lock. He believed thieves had got in through the ceiling, moving from unit to unit by cracking open ceiling tiles. At the time, he accused Shurgard of “systemic and ongoing security failures”.
Mr Rozanski also raised concerns about the company keeping CCTV footage for only three weeks. He said this made police investigations difficult when customers didn't discover a theft until months later.
Ms Osakonor has run into the same problem. She was told there was no CCTV footage capturing the break-in, which made a police investigation impossible. Unlike in Mr Rozanski's case, the ceiling of her unit had not been tampered with, which is what leads her to suspect an inside job.
What Shurgard has said
Shurgard did not respond to the Echo's request for comment about Ms Osakonor's case.
Responding to Mr Rozanski's concerns in 2025, the company said it took theft “very seriously”. It said staff had not been able to alert him or other potentially affected customers because there was no visible damage to doors or locks. Shurgard said it had since tightened security at the facility, with remote monitoring of CCTV and access reports after office hours, and had cut opening hours from 6am–11pm to 7am–9pm.
If you keep belongings in self-storage, it's worth checking your unit regularly. As both cases show, a theft found weeks later may no longer be on camera.
