Large sums of treasure were spent by the Mighty State Machine in the nineteen forties in
putting prefabs up. Two decades later large sums of treasure were spent by the Mighty State Machine in knocking prefabs down.
Tudor Walters had a big influence on public housing in Britain. Like Aneurin Bevan he believed it should be of a high quality. Others simply believed it should be high.
Almost every city has some tower blocks. The tenants of the first ones which went up were typically bricklayers, bus drivers, panel beaters, shop assistants and the like. They had low investment costs and were therefore easily replaceable if the towers came crashing down. Followers of Le Corbusier (or Charles-Edouard Jeanneret as we always call him on our estate)
dreamt of lifting prefabs into the sky and bolting them together into a stunning vista of silhouetted hanging baskets.
The idea of lifting bolted together prefab structures into the sky was given a boost by the 1956 Housing Subsidy Act. If a housing block went up four floors the council which built it would be
paid £20 a flat. If it went up another two floors this cash wad was almost doubled. Building firms and architects (most famously in Newcastle) found rich pickings could be made from reaching for the sky. Ground-hugging/low-density/one-storey buildings such as prefabs were soon trembling in their low-slung boots. They felt like mansions owned by the Russian aristocracy after the 1917 revolution. Housing the masses in mini-Habsburg palaces on acres of expensive land had become a luxury too far.
This is what happens when lateral thinkers in the 'Home Counties' (as if every county is not a 'home' county to those who live in it) convince the political class that massive savings can be made by housing people in places they would never dream of living in themselves.
Science fiction writers have been predicting a future in which those able to afford mountainous mortgages will live in tiny semi-detached houses which have giant television screens. Those who cannot afford the mountainous mortgages will live in cloud-hugging apartment blocks and give cheery waves to the passengers of jumbo-sized aeroplanes which zoom by their kitchen windows. Children will be read fairy stories about times when people lived in pale prefabs with gardens.
With any luck science fiction should continue to get it wrong.