157,000 prefab homes were built between 1945 and 1949. There was one spell when a new one was going up every twelve minutes! These pale pads were more than just temporary sticking plaster covering the gaping hole of the post-war housing shortage. They provided a harbour refuge after the ordeal of war. This was a utopia that worked!
The scarcity value of prefabs was such that some residents began to see themselves as a kind of reserve aristocracy in waiting. If the Duke and Duchess of Somerset suddenly keeled over then Mr and Mrs Swiley in prefab number twenty-five were ready to take their place! A sense of being one of the elect was to stay with prefab dwellers until the very end.
I was a big mistake of Aneurin Bevan, (Member of Parliament for Tredegar/Ebbw Vale from 1929 to 1960) to refer to prefabs as "chicken huts" and "rabbit hutches." This was bound to offend the amour propre of prefab residents. After all, the title of the political tract he wrote - In Place Of Fear - neatly encapsulated the mission of the prefabs.
When the Admiralty moved from London to Bath the civil servants were housed in te more spacious council houses rather than in prefabs. Some of them continued to own houses in London. Yet missing out on prefab living can be seen as a great spiritual loss. Our pads might look a shade cramped to those who glide by in chauffeur-driven Ministerial saloons, but just as the preface of Das Kapital warns readers there can be no "royal road" to science, so there can be no short-cut to grasping the Zen Of Prefab Life. Evenings have to be spent gazing into embers of the small coal fire, watching slivers of moonlight flicker on the aluminium-lined walls, and listening to the skid of bicycle tyres on the wet road outside. Only then can this compact architectural form make its expansive presence felt.
George Orwell should never have spent his final days in the winter of 1950 marooned in an isolated cottage on a windswept Scottish island. His mistake was to believethat "an uncomfortable, almost prison-like atmosphere" is par for the course in council housing. A stay on a convivial prefab estate would have lifted his spirits and arrested his decline. However he did get one thing right. By 1984 the prefab era was over and these pockets of freedom had been all but extinguished.