Prefabs: Back to the Future

Robert Elms enquired on his radio show where all the prefabs have gone. It prompted Steve Overbury to go out looking for some of the last remaining examples of early modular housing

In January 1953 floods swept down the coast of Essex leaving many dead or homeless. The road home from the Colchester maternity hospital was washed away and I was inconsiderate enough to choose that moment to be born, an Aquarian into a watery world. My proud parents weren’t prepared to swim home, so were forced to take me back to my gran’s house. They didn’t want me to spend my first night on earth in a swamped prefab. It was to be one of the only nights I didn’t sleep under that felt and tin roof in the next idyllic ten years.

I never knew I was deprived. I remained blissfully unaware that my home was generally considered fit only for gypsies, or the tribes of tattered refugees fleeing blitzed London.

On our part of the small estate, two rows of three prefabs faced each other, there were no front fences and the lawns stretched to a central path where all the kids ran around in total safety. Neighbours wandered house-to-house out the front and, via gates in the fences, garden-to-garden out the back. My brother and I were once parked in next-door’s yard in order that we should both contract chicken pox from their contagious kid. Do parents still do that?

I Love Lucy was on the television. Its broad American suburban streets were on a quite different scale to our six-foot wide child-friendly path but I was only two feet tall and to me our path was a boulevard. Turn right for my pal next door, turn left for the blackberry bushes or cross over to beg for sweets.

It took about a day to clip a prefab together. Erected by the thousand during the war to cope with the housing crisis, prefabs were only intended to be short-term accommodation – ten years tops - but as the post war depression lingered on, their indispensability as starter homes became more apparent and our house was still standing in the early 80s although we’d long moved on.

Some were imported from the USA and Canada, some were made in the UK. Ours consisted of slabs of pre-cast concrete panels covering a wooden frame to form a five-roomed bungalow. In fact my aspirational parents used to refer to our house as ‘the bungalow,’ the word ‘prefab,’ they felt carried a stigma.

The ‘bungalow’ had all mod cons - a fitted kitchen with an electric oven, hot running water and a fridge. Adjacent were two bedrooms, a living room and a bathroom; the garden boasted an asbestos shed, a galvanised steel coalbunker and a corrugated iron water butt - just enough essential parts - the JEEP of modular housing. It even had an airing cupboard that was good for hiding in which occasionally, when sleepwalking, I had been known to mistake for the toilet and pee over the linen.

All these luxuries were ours at a time when my grandparents had outside loos and my great gran would have to turn down the gas mantles before she went off to bed carrying her candle in one hand and a stone hot water bottle in the other. The potty was under her bed.

The prefab captured imaginations. People were thrilled by the idea that these flat pack palaces would arrive on a lorry in the morning and by teatime you could be sitting in your own hot bath. My parents grew to love their small but perfectly formed up-to-the-minute living unit.

And many other young forward-looking baby-boomer parents, riding the wave of post war regeneration, admired the building’s light, classic layout and clean lines, born of a utilitarian imperative. The prefab proved more popular than anyone had foreseen and far from pining for one of the expensive but conventional red brick semis down the road, I thought that we were an all-American nuclear family and our dad was Desi Arnaz.

A survey of 100 top home building companies reveals that forty-five of them say they are expecting the industry to revisit timber frame prefab construction. It seems that the prefab is to live again – only with a 21st century spin.

Prefabs are seen as a solution to the acute problem of providing starter homes, student accommodation and somewhere for nurses and teachers to live in the inner cities.

A new Peabody prefab development in Murray Grove, Hackney which uses innovative modern materials prompted architectural analyst Hugh Pearman writing in the Times to comment, “The surprise is not so much that homes are being made this way at the start of the 21st century. The real shock is that they have not been made like this for years already.”

Architects, fully aware of the housing crisis are looking at the basic prefab with renewed enthusiasm – even passion - and are thinking (literally) ‘out of the box’ citing Le Corbusier, Philippe Starck and Buckmaster Fuller (who built dome homes) as influences on future designs. However, slick though their units are, they remain stubbornly expensive. Only when economies of scale can be factored in can we expect to see more of these exciting lightweight developments in and around city centres.

In 2010 prefabs have vanished from Colchester but a smattering of survivors can still be spotted around Dulwich, Peckham and Nunhead, although they are becoming endangered. The prefabs in Nunhead, one of which has been ‘improved’ by the addition of leadlight windows and Tudor beams, have been around for sixty odd years and could possibly stand another sixty by which time they might have been customised beyond recognition but, sadly that’s unlikely since the council seems hell bent on expunging them from the area. As occupants die or move on the prefabs are cleared and are usually replaced with characterless cheap housing. There are only a couple still occupied in Lordship Lane. However, in Catford, six of the 175 prefabs on the Excalibur estate, which was built by Italian and German prisoners of war and is the largest surviving post-war prefab estate in England - have recently been given Grade II listing and may yet survive the council’s demolition plans.

Steve’s book is available here London Babylon 
Read his blog here and here

The Butcher’s Boy

Lenny Murphy - Head butcher

One day a dark and malign shadow fell over the Dulwich playground. The Holyhead ferry deposited another refugee onto the mainland who, on unpacking his Pandora bag, unleashed onto Lordship Lane a slice of the province’s Troubles all of his own, a destructive swarm of mayhem that threatened us all. It was Frankie, on the run, needing somewhere to hide, the brother of a friend. That’s when we first heard the expression, ‘the Shankill Butchers.’

Frankie had been born with troubles of his own, given to inner voices and the darkest of moods; as a 14 year-old he’d stowed away on a ship and found him self up and down the Fulham Broadway in the London sun, his big mistake being to go back home where he was virtually plucked from the gangplank by the UVF or was it the UDA, and pressed into service. Little matter, the die was cast and Frankie would never again be free of his dark masters.

Running messages, flogging dope, carrying guns, driving psychos with Semtex, he was enslaved to a cause he felt nothing for, and the work he did for them combined with the storms he was born with, blew him towards his own inevitable destruction. Used and abused by them, one time he had been frogmarched out of a club leaving his family grieving that he would never return and though he did, his chest and his legs had been burned livid with cigarettes.

The Shankill Butchers specialised in vicious random brutality, plucking strangers off the streets to be treated to an evening of slicing, hacking evisceration. The pack’s leader was an ex-school bully, who in league with his own devilish brothers and a one time butcher favoured the meat man’s tools to slit throats back to the spine, to sever limbs with one swipe, or if he wanted to prolong the pleasure, two; he frequently confused Catholic with Protestant and in the end cared little who he sliced as long as the blood flowed free, the flesh and bone was cleaved and the maw of lust stuffed and satisfied.

After a protracted period of terror with around 30 murders, torture, involving teeth pulling and skinning alive (a woman reported hearing a man screaming, “Kill me, kill me"), the gang foolishly left one victim alive who had them all arrested.

The Butchers, all except its psychopathic, school bully boss, went down for 42 life sentences in the end, and life was intended to mean life, except it didn’t and most walked free under the Good Friday Agreement. The boss bully, as bullies often do, escaped justice entirely but met it in a more appropriate style when he was himself gunned down by IRA bullets one night, his old enemies partnered as they were by the UDA in an unholy alliance, such was the sickness that ordinary mass murderers both side of the divide had begun to feel for those who simply enjoyed slaughter. And it’s hard not to feel that the IRA for once did something right that night, but that perhaps they might have lingered with their brutality and involved his own knives, lest maybe he might have got some final kick out of that too.

But before the Butchers’ own dismemberment, whatever Frankie was up to, they’d booked him on their list of hate and God alone knows what terrors and wild imaginings he carried with him as he ran for his life.

Only temporarily lost in the lights of South London he brought with him the dark malignance of Belfast like it was clamped to his back. There were rumours of guns; wherever he went spontaneous fights broke out, pub tables would be overturned, dirty deals done, hospitalities abused. Initially the crazies of Dulwich hung on to his tales, plied him with drinks, harked to his yarns about cutting edge and blood splatter, they all fanned up their own puny flames and he made them shiver with vicarious delight, but then when the reality of day set in and the drink had left them, whenever Frankie was spied in the distance they would cross Lordship Lane and duck into doorways away from him, and even the London branch of his own family lay low when he visited because nothing good ever came of it. For his sister, indelibly close to him, this was sharp agony because she of all of them clung to the memory of the warm boy that once inhabited the damaged man. 

Frankie went home one time too many, kept his date with destiny and was flung from a hotel balcony to be shattered on the road below. Was it the UDA, was it the IRA or just another country? Could it have even been MI5 who launched him into the great infinity and laughed as the broken bird fell? All the factions had been lurking in the shadows that night and they all had a motive to snuff poor Frankie out, who was in the end almost resigned to his fate, doomed from the start. No one will ever know who actually did it and maybe no one ever should; those murky waters settled and couldn’t be stirred ever without healing hearts breaking all over again.