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  One of the residents of Excalibur, Eddie O’Mahoney, had lived there from the time it was built and was still there when this book was being written. ‘I’d been demobbed from the army and my wife was living in some bomb-damaged property with the two children,’ he told the Guardian in 2012. ‘When the council offered it, I immediately said, “I don’t want a prefab – I want a house.” I’d had enough of living in tents and Nissen huts. They told me to go and look before I decided. We opened the door and my wife said, “What a lovely big hall! We can get the pram in here.” There was a toilet and a bathroom. I’d been used to a toilet in the garden. The kitchen had an Electrolux refrigerator, a New World gas stove, plenty of cupboards. There was a nice garden. It was like coming into a fortune. My wife said, “Start measuring for the lino.”’11

  One of my own interviewees also had fond memories of them. I hadn’t expected to talk to Peter Barry about prefabs; we met up much later, on the final leg of my journey, to discuss his experiences as one of the pioneers of Milton Keynes in the seventies. But he surprised me almost at once by declaring that he’d been a pioneer in more than one field: he’d grown up in a prefab straight after the war. A large, avuncular, excitable figure, Peter had moved to the Barton Estate in Oxford in the forties.

  ‘They were so well equipped!’ he told me as we chatted in his modernist Milton Keynes house.

  ‘I think it was 1946 when we moved into there. When you think of 1946–47, what basic equipment there was in the house! We moved into this little prefab bungalow and all the kitchen was steel. It had a refrigerator. It had an immersion heater. It had a gas boiler to do your washing in. And everything was built-in. It was like going into a futuristic environment you see on television programmes! It was all built-in units, which are quite common now, but not then. The boiler was, I suppose, a forerunner to the washing machine. You lit it and it boiled the water and then you did all your washing in it. It was all part of the fitted kitchen, it was an amazing bit of kit.’

  He made it sound more like a much-loved sports car than a kitchen. Like many of the new prefab occupants, Peter’s family had moved out of an overcrowded and awkward situation, squashed into his grandmother’s house. ‘My parents were thrilled to have their own place,’ he remembered, ‘albeit council. They had their own house and they could do what they wanted. My grandmother: if you’re living in her house, you’re living under her rules, which are not your rules. They’re not what you want to do as a married couple.’ In his case, religious tensions had aggravated the relationship between Catholic father and Protestant mother-in-law. ‘I don’t think she went to my mother’s wedding. She wouldn’t have anything to do with it. And dad had to come home from Egypt to live in that sort of atmosphere. There was tension.’ It was a huge relief to be able to live as they liked. ‘My father was a great gardener, he grew all his own veg. My mother kept chickens. It was a good lifestyle, really. I remember what it was like being able to have a hot bath every night, which was unheard of at that time. And fields to play in. I was off playing cowboys and Indians or whatever. In the prefab from where we lived you could see open country out of the garden. You could roam.’

  The prefabs at Excalibur sit along a network of narrow paths that stretch between a simple grid of roads. The layout serves no fancier purpose than to fit in as many buildings as possible in the space, allowing for small gardens around each home.

  A row of well-maintained Uni-Secos on the Excalibur Estate, 2011.

  I’m sure the Selection Engineering Company would be shocked – and perhaps also proud – to know that a whole estate of them is still standing, nearly 70 years after their construction. Despite their initial popularity, it soon became apparent that these miracle boxes, and many others like them, weren’t perfect: there were leaky roofs; their thin walls and single glazing let the warmth out and the cold in; and the concrete, or sometimes wooden, bases allowed the damp to rise. For otherwise homeless families they must have been a godsend in the winter of 1946-7 – the harshest on record – but no doubt their flimsiness was frequently cursed. These days a damp cardboardy smell permeates many of the remaining buildings. And while their frailty and small scale makes it easy to feel a connection with them, the same qualities can also prompt resentment – even without the many tragic cases of asbestosis and bronchitis that have been attributed to them.

  Naturally enough, moving to a more permanent residence was the dream for many a prefab-dweller. But that didn’t happen quickly. By 1948, around 157,000 temporary houses had been produced – significantly less than the half-million Churchill had promised. They’d been far more expensive to produce than had been anticipated. ‘This was partly because the basic materials used were expensive (particularly aluminium and steel),’ wrote the government’s advisor on construction, Cleeve Barr, in 1966. The assumption was that prefabs were a much cheaper solution than building traditional bricks and mortar homes, but Cleeve Barr was at pains to point out that this was not the case. He wasn’t much taken by their homely charms, either. ‘Two hundred standardised houses on a flat site can look like a shop floor full of shoe-boxes.’12

  By 1964, 15 years after they should have been emptied and dismantled, 71 percent of these shoe-boxes were still standing. In Manchester, of the 3,004 prefabs built in the city, just one had been removed by 1960, and that was only because it had burned down. This was understandable given the scale of the city’s housing problem: in 1955 alone, 68,000 houses in the city had been condemned, 13,000 people had been forced to live in lodgings and 800 old homes had simply fallen down of their own accord. Despite the expiration of the original licenses that had allowed the prefabs to occupy what had been parks and open spaces – often where makeshift airfields and military camps had been built during the war – the council had no option but to allow them to remain.

  Not that all prefab dwellers wanted to move out, even when they did get the chance. ‘Council officials came round this morning and offered some families the choice of three new houses to move into,’ a Mrs Barnes, resident of Heaton Park’s improvised prefab town, told the Guardian in 1961. ‘But we don’t want to go. The vast majority of us are satisfied with where we are now. We’re settled in, have got the prefabs nicely decorated and find them very comfortable. We’ll even pay more rent if they let us stay.’13 Not so in Birkenhead, where in 1961 the tenants of 41 prefabs handed a petition in to the town hall demanding to be rehoused.

  ‘They were built with a stated life span which was by far exceeded,’ recalled Peter Barry, ‘because they were there long after we were rehoused. And I think in the end they were sold by Oxford city council to anyone who wanted them. And a lot of them ended up on the coast. Because all you needed was a concrete base with the services and you could plonk it down and plumb it in and they made wonderful holiday chalets! You still see them around in places in Somerset, Devon and Cornwall.’ Excalibur resident Ian Goold told the Guardian, ‘To me it’s like a holiday camp all year round.’14

  Many of the houses in the Excalibur Estate are painted white or magnolia, but a number are in striking pastel colours, and some have painted the Uni-Seco’s structural frame a mock-Tudor black. There’s a flush of Georgian front doors, and the odd leaded window, but many still have the original single-glazed metal frames, identical to those on the prewar council house I grew up in, with nets hanging in most of them. Mid-century modern-style kitsch is nowhere in evidence. Sure, there’s the odd neglected one gradually mulching where it stands, but for the rest it’s an even split between the very well kept and the considerably more lived in: portacabins versus cottages. There’s an amazing variety considering that they all started off the same. And unlike the surrounding Victorian terraces, they are all detached, with their own gardens.

  The friendly, nostalgia-inducing cosiness of these prefabs belies a dark side to their history. Many were built by prisoners of war: Germans from Rommel’s Tank Corps, as well as some Italians. Britain was slow to repatriate PoWs, even to countries that had be
en far more devastated by the war and were desperately in need of labour to begin the work of rebuilding. In 1946, over 400,000 Germans were still in British camps, and were used as forced labour, not just in construction but also in agriculture, as a form of reparation. ‘When we had the keys to move in there were no pavements laid, no entrance down to the house,’ recalled Ruth Haynes, of her AIRO H prefab in Plymouth. ‘Every day, German PoWs came by lorry to work on the estate. Seeing our predicament, they very kindly laid a few blocks as stepping stones for us to get to the door “mud free”. Seeing we weren’t really allowed to fraternise, when I was baking there would always be some small warm cakes, left on the doorstep, for them as a thank you.’15

  By no means were all of the prefabs built as part of the temporary housing programme. Some became prototypes for the most enduring housing types of the postwar period. The BISF – British Iron and Steel Federation – house was typical of these permanent structures. This was a two-storey semi, designed by engineer Dominic Lee and architect Frederick Gibberd (who would go on to be the master planner of Harlow). A steel frame was erected first, then steel panels were used for the roofs and upper storeys, with more conventional building materials used for the lower floor. The BISF house was one of the prefabs on show at the Daily Herald Modern Homes Exhibition in Dorland Hall, Lower Regent Street, in spring 1946. Opinion pollsters Mass Observation were on hand to record the thoughts of the public: they described the crowd as containing ‘a very high representation of the artisan class’, with more than half of the men and almost half of the younger people they interviewed having no home of their own or expressing dissatisfaction with it.16 The kitchens, fitted with the latest gadgets, and the sturdy new utility furniture were the most popular exhibits, but people were less taken with the one-room flat that was on display, which was considered impractical due to its size.

  The Dorland Hall exhibition featured several examples of prefabs other then the BISF. There was the Orlit, a two-storey house made from reinforced concrete, designed by Czech architect Erwin Katona, and produced in Scotland and the Airey house, from Leeds, made from concrete panels and reinforced with tubing made from decommissioned military vehicles, and available in flat or pitched roofed variants. To the visitors the Orlit ‘looked more permanent … had a personality’, while the BISF houses seemed ‘a bit barracky… Imagine rows and rows of them.’17 Many of the visitors gave them a hard time. ‘You know we were offered the choice of a prefab?’ one told the Mass Observation interviewer. ‘Well, I wouldn’t have it. They’re nice inside, but they look dreadful from the road.’ Another was rather more blunt. ‘Those prefabs are awful – when you see a lot together they look like pigsties or hen-houses I always think.’18 We had some BISF houses in New Addington; their steel panels were always painted bright colours and were fascinating to me as I was growing up, with so much of the estate being so red-brick and uniform. They seemed somehow to speak of adventure, with their improvised-looking metal walls and the moss growing on their corrugated steel roofs. I didn’t know then that the estate had once been home to hundreds of temporary prefab bungalows, before the red-brick houses were built in the fifties. This whole prefab story was closer to home than I’d realised.

  Prefabs in New Addington in the early 1950s: Arcons in the foreground, AIRO Hs top left, and BISF houses along the top of the hill. © Croydon Local Studies Library and Archives Service

  The experience of living in a prefab, like the experience of rationing, is disappearing from popular memory. For the 44 percent of residents at Excalibur who voted to keep the prefabs rather than redevelop, their slow and painful dispersal is causing much heartfelt opposition: photocopied A4 notices in windows read I’m not moving I’m takeing the council to court so is the rest of us who loves owe prefabs. [sic] These notices and the whole estate have a dignified air of doom that stays with me as I walk away. I feel unexpectedly moved: perhaps by faint childhood memories of prefab holiday homes by the sea, or school buildings past, or the story of my parents’ life in Battersea after the war.

  ‘To move out of here … quite frankly, I’d rather be finished,’ said Eddie O’Mahoney, fiercely loyal to his prefab and the little estate when he was interviewed in 2012. ‘If they want to evict a 92-year-old war veteran, good luck to them. I’ve been happy here, all my memories are here. Be honest: what will they offer someone like me? What I bought, I want to keep. I took a pride in this place. I loved it.’19

  Notes

  1 Donald Gibson, Midlands Daily Telegraph, 5/12/40 (talk on Wednesday of that week, report is from Thursday)

  2 Nicolas Bullock, Building the Post-War World, Routledge, 2002, p173

  3 The Times, 24/2/45, p5

  4 The Times, 27/6/44 p5

  5 Seco ad, The Times, 29/10/45, p3

  6 Advertisement, The Times, 27/11/52, p7

  7 Uni-Seco ad, The Times, 30/9/52, p3

  8 Steve Humphries and John Taylor, The Making of Modern London, Sidgwick and Jackson, 1986, p144

  9 Greg Stevenson, Palaces for the People, Batsford, 2003, p55

  10 Greg Stevenson, Palaces for the People, Batsford, 2003, p103

  11 Ros Anderson, Guardian, 28/12/2012

  12 Cleeve Barr, chief architect NBA, The Times Supplement on Industrialised Building, 21/3/66, piii

  13 Guardian, 14/2/61, p6

  14 Ros Anderson, Guardian, 28/12/2012

  15 Greg Stevenson, Palaces for the People, Batsford, 2003, p56

  16 Daily Herald Modern Homes Exhibition in Dorland Hall, Lower Regent St, Spring 46, Mass Observation, p3

  17 Second Report on Modern Homes Exhibition, Mass Observation, 8/4/46, p10

  18 Second Report on Modern Homes Exhibition, Mass Observation, 8/4/46, p11

  19 Guardian, 28/12/2012

  2. ‘A Decent Start in Life’

  GARDEN CITIES AND THE FIRST NEW TOWNS (1946–51)

  The big manor house stood surrounded by horse chestnut trees in the heart of the Hertfordshire countryside. A group of highly skilled technicians had taken Terlings over in the forties with the government’s blessing, erecting two rows of prefabricated huts in the garden to form their offices. Their urgent, detailed work was overseen by ex-military commanders, senior civil servants, doctors, even Bertrand Russell’s pipe-smoking wife, Peta. ‘Everyone worked terribly hard and played hard during their lunch break,’ wrote Ena Elliot, one of the many secretaries busy at work there in the late forties and fifties. ‘I remember tennis and swimming, and then the annual garden parties, cricket matches and cross-country runs … I remember the great enthusiasm and interest of the staff – many of them would take work home each night.’1

  I met one of those members of staff, Janet Search, in her ranch-style house in the Hertfordshire village of Sawbridgeworth. ‘It was all right unless it poured with rain and there was flooding,’ was Janet’s rather less romantic memory of working at Terlings. ‘You all cycled on these high pavements to get into the building. But it was a beautiful building. And all of the drawing offices were these prefabricated wooden places.’ It’s easy to see Terlings, with its huts teeming with intellectuals, experts and their committed support staff, as another Bletchley Park. But the place wasn’t full of secret code-breakers. It was home to a dynamic team of planners, architects, draughtsmen and women, and administrators – all working frantically to create something vast and new in the English countryside with a minimum of time and resources. A new town – one of the first four designated by the postwar Labour government. The team at Terlings were inventing Harlow.

  ‘I worked at Terlings when I first left school,’ said Janet, who’d arrived in Harlow as a teenager in 1952, as the first phase of the town was in progress. ‘And that was quite interesting really because it was all planning.’ What was her job? ‘Tracer. Plotting lampposts!’ She laughed. Sounds like a thankless task, I said. ‘It was.’ Yet the plotting of lampposts perfectly encapsulates how all-encompassing the work at Terlings was, from the grandest vision to the most basic detail.
The Harlow Journal reminded its readers two years later that ‘during the autumn and winter of 1951 there was just one lamp standard in the new town. There were no shops, no cinema, no new school, no Moot House and no pub. There was, however, mud, more mud, and still more mud.’2

  John Reed, whose family had also moved to Harlow in 1952, pointed out the concrete lampposts as we walked together around Mark Hall North, the first area of Harlow new town to be built. ‘I’m told these lamp standards, the concrete part was built before the war for a big job in Germany’ – he gave a hearty laugh at the absurdity of the situation – ‘and after the war someone found them lying about so we’ve got lamp standards. One of the things my dad told me once, I dunno where he got the information from.’

  Both Janet and John had fathers who were builders, which explains their early arrival in a town that had been announced to the public only five years previously and, by 1952, had barely begun to be built. As Janet plotted lampposts and John’s father pondered their provenance, much bigger decisions were being made by the senior planners. ‘When I worked at Terlings, Frederick Gibberd used to come in quite regularly,’ said Janet. ‘He always had a buttonhole. He was ever such a nice chap. He’d always acknowledge you and come round.’ Gibberd, he of the government-sponsored temporary steel house, had been chosen as the master planner for the town in September 1946, well before the designation of the town had been made public, in an effort to ensure they had some attractive plans to reveal when the announcement was made. ‘Apart from having an attitude to design acceptable to the new generation of architects, I was one of the few among them with planning qualifications,’ said Gibberd, explaining his appointment for such a plum job.3