War Damage And Rebuilding: Prefabs In London

~ beetleypete

Prefabricated homes were seen as the quick answer to the housing shortage caused by German bombing in WW2. Built on top of pre-plumbed ­concrete slabs, these homes could be erected in a day by teams of German and Italian prisoners-of-war who were in no hurry to return home, come the peace. Londoners soon gave them the shortened name, Prefabs.

For more than 150,000 homeless, bombed-out families across Britain, these two-bedroom prefabs were meant to be a merely temporary solution at the end of the war. But they were a godsend, too — detached houses with the then astonishing luxury of a garden, a bathroom, and a separate indoor toilet. They soon became the envy of those still living in pre-war accommodation nearby, and were one of the most desirable options for social housing.

As a child in the 1950s, I remember them near where we lived, and how much everyone was jealous of being able to live in one.

They were designed to last only ten years, just long enough to allow post-war Britain to build all those wonderful new council blocks for homecoming heroes like Hector Murdoch and his family.

As the Sixties unfolded, multi-storey concrete utopias were popping up all over Britain’s ­metropolitan skylines and most of the prefabs came down. But as the years went on, the script went badly wrong. Many people found that they hated living in high-rise blocks, no matter how much the architects and the councils told them how lucky they were. In the end, the tower blocks started coming down again. Yet, the remaining prefabs — and their grateful residents — stayed put.

Even the local church was prefabricated.

Sadly, most have since been demolished by different authorities around Britain. In total, 156,623 prefab bungalows were built between 1945 and 1949. According to the Pre-fab Museum, around 8,000 are left in the UK with around 30 listed for presevation. They are still lived in today.

40 thoughts on “War Damage And Rebuilding: Prefabs In London”

  1. Architects and the council are not the voice of the people. No wonder they hated high-rise living. Pete, I enjoyed this post. I didn’t know that prefab homes were build on top of the the foundation of bombed homes. Brilliant!

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  2. We need some right now. with modern technology they are making modules and all sorts of pre fab. PS, as a keen gardener I think any sort of home becomes more desirable with a garden, window boxes whatever is suitable.

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      1. Yes it was if you went from what was the Wakes Arms roundabout towards Epping then Thornwood was just past Epping by the what was the Merry Fiddlers I think although its probably something else now 🙂 x

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  5. I spent two summers building the walls for raise-on-site (on the rez) pre fab houses for the BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs). Ours had roof trusses as well, built in the warehouse next door. I would say the framing quality was as good or better than stick built. I have no idea what the had for exteriors, but we’d build walls, slide them off the table into a stack, bundle them up and a fork lift would come load the stack on a flat bed along with some trusses and it was a house to go. Same deal, a crew would unload them at the site and have a house in a day. I liked the Quonset hut church. That’s an idea that should have caught on. It’s good to see that pride of ownership counts for more than the engineers’ estimation of life span.

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    1. The did build prefabricated blocks of flats in the 1960s here. They used concrete panels that slotted into a frame. Insulation was not considered, and many suffered with damp and mould too.
      Best wishes, Pete.

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      1. I agree….I read an article about a guy in Western Sahara that uses empty soda bottles to make small homes…..it can be done if someone would step forward and do the right thing. chuq

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  9. I’m not sure I ever came across one of them while I was in the UK, although I had my office in one for a while, and I much preferred it to sharing an office. Here they showed on the news a company that is building homes from ship containers, and the end result looked pretty good. Thanks, Pete.

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    1. Prefabs were ‘proper’ homes. They had a living room, kitchen, bathroom and toilet, and two bedrooms. The small gardens were much loved by people too. They could easily do this again, using new materials and modern methods. But now they claim the price of building land makes it uneconomical. The solution is to compulsorily purchase the land at a fair price, but that won’t happen.
      Best wishes, Pete.

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  10. Pingback: War Damage And Rebuilding: Prefabs In London | Ned Hamson's Second Line View of the News

  11. Yes, we lived in a prefab in the 1960s, but then we had to move as a college was going to be built on the land. We then moved to a brand new estate across the river in 1971. I loved the prefab and hated living on that estate in a high-rise tower block.

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  12. Having your own space has a lot to be said for it. Those estate buildings may have started out well but became ghastly. My brother’s in-laws were in one and trying to locate them was a challenge. Their place was immaculate and they were lovely people but they could do nothing about what was beyond their front door. No doubt you were very familiar with them in London. Over here we have “modular” homes that are pre-fabricated. My aunt and uncle bought one when they retired and it served them well. Interesting that there is a Pre-fab museum but it is part of social history after all. Very interesting.

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    1. Thanks, Carolyn. I know a great deal about the estates of tower blocks and ‘compressed housing’ that still blight London. They are the root cause of most of the crime and social problems in that city. Something like the prefabs would have been a far better option in the 1960s.
      Best wishes, Pete.

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  15. It’s interesting to me that the postwar prefabs are analogous to the single-storey, bungalow-style ‘sheltered’ or warden-controlled accommodation which most towns now have, and the elderly residents seem to enjoy living in them. I can remember prefabs, of course: even in Bournemouth, which suffered minimal war damage, there was plenty of them; there are also a couple [and possibly more, elsewhere] in Whitby, in the town centre. Cheers, Jon.

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