The slick salesman in the corner prefab warns everyone around here to be wary of the conceptual sleights of hand and over-grandiose leaps of high theory that - so he reckons - dominate so much of Continental thought. "British philosophy might be a shade uninspiring", he says, "but at least it keeps its empirical feet on the ground." The slick salesman says it is the same with the prefabs: "The noble Euclidian simplicity of a sharp-edged rectangle is what pragmatic pre-fabricated design is all about."
Philosophy has been big on this estate ever since we first moved in. Take the case of our "fastest in the west" milkman. He goes round knocking on doors and says: "What do you really mean when you say a pint of milk? Could you be making a category error here? If you don't start defining your terms and clarifying your assumptions you will get buggar all!"
The slick salesman says we could learn a lot from what is happening on the other side of the Atlantic. R.Buckminster Fuller has been trying to persuade the Beech Aircraft Company to criss-cross the planet with circular dome-shaped prefabs and abandoning the sharp-angled straight lined ones hat you see over here. "Should the rectangle be encircled?" is now the 'Big Prefab Question'. Thumb through the latest issue of the Burlington Magazine of Connoisseurs (a much coveted publication on our estate) and you will see that prefab aestetics is now the talk of the town. In one of its now legendary editorials it declared there was something chic about prefabs:

"A shed is a building, a cathedral is architecture, but a prefab is design!"