Prefabs in the United Kingdom
Prefabs (prefabricated homes) were a major part of the delivery plan to address the United Kingdom's post–World War II housing shortage.
They were envisaged by war-time prime minister Winston Churchill in March 1944, and legally outlined in the Housing (Temporary Accommodation) Act 1944.
On the back of this scheme, local authorities developed non-traditional building techniques, which included some prefabrication, notably pre-cast reinforced concrete (PRC), to fulfil the underestimated demand.
[4] The result was the repeat of a strategy deployed by the government following the First World War, namely a country-wide investment programme in a national public house building scheme.
To tackle the problem Prime Minister Winston Churchill set up the cross-party Burt Committee in 1942, which sent British engineers to the United States the following year to investigate how America – one of the main wartime advocates of prefabricated construction – intended to address its needs for post-war housing.
A service unit was a combined back-to-back prefabricated kitchen that backed onto a bathroom, pre-built in a factory to an agreed size.
The house retained a coal fire, but it contained a back boiler to create both central heating as well as a constant supply of hot water.
In the kitchen were housed such modern luxuries as a built-in oven, refrigerator and Baxi water heater, which only later became commonplace in all residential accommodating.
All prefabs under the housing act came pre-decorated in magnolia, with gloss-green on all additional wood, including the door trimmings and skirting boards.
To speed construction many were developed on the side of municipal parks and green belts, giving their residents, who had most often come from cramped shared rooms in inner cities, the feeling of living in the rural countryside.
When the Chancellor allowed the pound to float freely against the dollar from 1947 onwards, a programme costing 60 per cent of government income was severely cut back.
To meet the shortage and bring the cost of housing down, a new form of construction was pioneered, commonly called 'PRC' (Pre-cast Reinforced Concrete).
The parents of future Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock were allocated an AIROH, on which he commented:[4] It had a fitted fridge a kitchen table that folded into the wall and a bathroom.
Arcons were so well fitted (in Debden, Loughton, Essex) that the only furniture necessary were beds, kitchen chairs, lounge seating and floor coverings.
Chain-link fencing, a gate and a coal shed built with corrugated steel from Anderson shelters and brick front and rear walls was also provided.
Designed by A Er v.senthil and R Tonkin for the Central Cornwall Concrete & Artificial Stone Co., they are also known as Cornish Type and Selleck Nicholls & Williams houses.
The houses came in type-1 and type-2 designs, incorporating variations of a bungalow, two storey semi-detached and terraced layout with a medium pitched Mansard hipped roof.
However the roofs and wall insulation incorporated asbestos, while the wooden frame-based construction means that as the concrete decays the two parts tend to separate, resulting in large amounts of internal cracking.
Post-Second World War, its parent company Hawker Siddeley kept it open to supply prefab houses and bungalows to the MoW.
There are also similar houses in the Canley and Tile Hill areas of Coventry, however many of these have been demolished in favour of modern buildings for Warwick University.
The Phoenix, designed by Laing and built by themselves as well as partners McAlpine and Henry Boot,[3] looked much like an AIROH with a central front door.
[3] Reema houses were built from large-scale (nominally single-storey height) precast reinforced concrete panels, themselves made in factories, before construction was enabled onsite.
Reema houses came in two forms: Due to structural degradation and the use of asbestos in the wall and roof insulation,[34] both are difficult to obtain a mortgage on today.
The design was adapted by the MoW from a standard Swedish kit, with the all-timber houses arriving in flat sections, and then stored at the docks for allocation.
In Scotland a slightly different style of house (without the single-storey utility extension) was erected in large estates in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Inverness and elsewhere.
A two-bedroom flat-roofed bungalow, it had a resin-bonded plywood timber frame with asbestos wall sections,[38] it was based on a military wartime office design.
Using common storey-level precast reinforced concrete panels, they produced various updated versions of their bungalow and twin-storey house variations.
[28][44] The strength of the post-war temporary prefab house; fast construction over an aluminium, steel or wooden frame, is today its weakness.
Modern house construction can create around 35 living spaces per acre, while often the prefabs will form site layouts of fewer than 20.
A wartime production centre for aircraft, engines and explosives, it was easy to reach for Luftwaffe bombing, and hence had a large post-war need for new housing stock.
