The post-war Labour Government (1945-51) made a bid at nudging the "to those that hath shall be given" principle to one side. People who might have been left permanently homeless were given temporary homes. Because building materials were in short supply at this time scrap metal (such as aluminium from war planes) was used to build prefabs. This means estates like ours were fighters from the word go!
The first time a prefab was allowed to make a public exhibition of itself was in May 1944 when a prototype prefab went on public display in London's Tate Gallery. Soon tens of thousands of factory-built units were being loaded on to lorries, transported to open spaces, cemented into the ground, smeared with asbestos, and connected to water mains and electricity cables. There was even some wild futuristic talk of connecting them to telephone lines!
The cities which had been bombed the most like Coventry and Hull were put at the head of the prefab queue. Places filled with medium-sized piles of rubble like Bristol and Bath were not far behind. To those who had been stuck in dingy basement flats, or were squatting in army camps, or making do in Salvation Army hostels, the offer of a prefab key came like manna from heaven.
The official remit of the 1944 Housing (Temporary Accommodation) Act was to provide "a temporary solution to the post-war housing shortage." Some felt they were little more than "tin cans" and deserved more permanent cladding. Others felt they were not temporary enough and that money would be far better spent on country estates rather than on prefab estates. After all this was a time when there were grand country houses with leaks in their bow wings and crumbling porticos!
Evelyn Waugh does not seem to have been unduly concerned about the post-war housing shortage. On March 13 1944 he wrote this to his friend Lady Dorothy Lygon about the book that would be known as 'Brideshead Revisited'.

"I am writing a very beautiful book, to bring tears, about very rich people, beautiful, high born people who live in palaces and have no troubles except what they make themselves and these are mainly the demons of sex and drink which after all are easy to bear as troubles go nowadays."

The prefabs never had their Evelyn Waugh (which is perhaps just as well). No very beautiful book was ever written about them. The people who lived in them had plenty of troubles beyond those which they made themselves, and they faced up to them with courage and a spirit of fortitude. These Prefab Files salute them!