Press the reverse button of your time travel machine (don't tell me they haven't been invented yet!), head back to the year 1953 and take a look at the window ledges at the front of our prefab. You will see they are draped with three Union Jack flags. The most anyone else can muster is two!
The mantelpieces in prefab sitting-rooms are not just chock-a-block with commemorative Coronation plates. They are chock-a-block with commemorative Coronation spoons, commemorative Coronation knives, commemorative Coronation trays, and - a big favourite - commemorative Coronation mugs. "Mugs with mugs!" is the drinking salutation given by members of the Oliver Cromwell Society when they meet up in the Hat and Feather public house on the London Road. (This is their favourite public house as it was originally a Royalist stronghold).
By the end of June 1953 there was hardly a two year old in the kingdom who could not spell 'Coronation' and draw a coronet as well. Captains of industry saw they were on to a winner when they re-branded their mints, sofas, lollies, and evaporated milk as Coronation mints, Coronation sofas, Coronation lollies, and Coronation evaporated milk. It was all getting out of hand. Even Twiverton barbers started saying "any Coronations for the week-end sir?"
The mood was already heady in the prefabs when - in May 1953 - local subbuteo table footballers were allowed to go into 'Tubby' Lard's sitting-room and watch the television broadcast of Blackpool's 4-3 victory over Bolton Wanderers. Stanley Mortensen scored a hat-trick. (Who would have guessed that his football career would reach even higher heights when he joined Bath City a few years later!) May 1953 was also the time zone when Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary climbed Mount Everest (with a Bath Bun in their knapsack, or so it was said). A year later in May 1954 a former Bath schoolboy Roger Bannister went where no man had gone before and ran the mile in under four minutes.
The 'Prefabnia Extraordinus years' is how historians refer to the period from May 1953 to May 1954. They were the high point of classical prefab civilization. What is so perplexing is that no pieces of commemorative crockery - not even a single, solitary mug - were ever produced which featured the iconic symbol of the prefab.