Prefabs might be the butt of cheap jokes but they do not come cheap. It costs a thousand pounds to build one! The annual cost of the prefab building programme launched in 1944 was £150 million.
This housing genre comes in a lush variety of forms. Some prefabs have walls that are smooth and straight, some have walls that are wavy and corrugated. Some prefabs have roofs that are flat and some have roofs that slope. Some prefab front doors are positioned bang in the centre while some are positioned towards one of the sides. Some estates have prefabs connected by big roads while others are connected by tiny footpaths. Some are mega-complexes with over a hundred prefabs while others are slim-line affairs with less than thirty.
At our last count we found there were no less than thirteen different types of prefab. (This
puts the eleven dimensions of the universe discovered by modern physics into the shade!) The strikingly diverse prefabs species (prefabnia differentia) includes the Hamish (types 1 and 2), Duplex Sheaths, Bricket Wood Specials, and the Blackburn Orlit. There is even one gem known as the Foamed Slag.
For the most part prefab evolution has followed the Darwinian principle of 'survival of the flattest'. This could all change if R.Buckminster Fuller's dome-shaped ones start to prove their worth. The estate we live on is made of the traditional 'AIROH Aluminium Bungalows'. (AIROH is an acronym for 'Aircraft Industries Research Organisation in Housing'.) Any day now a brass nameplate engraved with Airoh House Residence will make its dazzling one-up-man-ship appearance in the slick salesman's immaculate corner prefab.
Plans are being floated for estate residents to have holiday exchanges with people who live in Spooner, Universal, and Uni-Seco prefabs.

"What do they know of prefabs who only one prefab knows?"

The tourist itinerary of the Bath Roaming City Coach Company is beginning to look rather jaded. Day trips to the usual suspects - Cheddar Gorges, Spooky Hole, Weston-Super-Mud, the Minehole Holiday Camp, and the Obese Lion Tamer's House - no longer pack their old punch. The masses are getting restless and hanker for wider horizons. Guided tours to the Tarrans prefabs of Hull, the Phoenixs of Bristol, and the Arcons of Newport could take the tourist industry by storm. It could just be a matter of time before UNESCO is nudged into giving these remarkable places the World Heritage Site recognition they surely deserve.