Living with no upstairs (this is the cue for "in more ways than one") helps give prefab residents a well-grounded sense of identity. Prefabs were originally expected to last, at best, for ten years. That faint hearted deadline was passed yonks ago! In fact prefabs could be standing tall (in a manner of speaking) for decades to come. Some extra padding in the walls, well-targeted repairs to the roof, and a few licks of fresh paint would be enough to give them a massive life-prolonging boost.
Not that anyone is going to let on to this just now. Lips will remain tightly sealed and people will stay stum. The mouth-watering prospect of moving into real council houses with walls made of brick and swish upstairs toilets is being dangled in front of everyone's noses. Carefully laid plans to organise hunger strikes to stop the prefabs being torn down have been put on hold.
Moving out of our prefab estate should be a straightforward operation. It will not take the demolition squad long to strip the landscape of these thin-slivered ghostly-pale architectural forms. They say it will take just two days to move the residents out of their prefabs. Taking the prefabs out of the residents is going to be a rathr trickier operation. A yearning to return has been buried deep within our psyches. One day it will force its way up through the acres of concrete and tarmac and explode into the daylight as a forest of glorious sunflowers.