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On this, the 70th anniversary year of the Second World War, we thought it would be a nice idea to pay tribute to the great British Prefab. Prefabricated temporary houses were erected in their thousands at the end of the war, as a solution to the housing crisis created by all the homes lost in the Blitz. However, these structures, which were only ever designed to be lived in for 5 – 10 years, lasted well beyond their given lifetime, with many people still living in them today. In Bristol for example, 700 residents were still living in prefabs during 2002 – almost sixty years after they had been built!

Four different versions of the prefab were produced, all using more or less the same layout, but made of different materials; most were aluminium, produced in aircraft factories, whilst others were constructed of steel and timber, all in prefabricated in sections to be bolted together on site. At a cost of around £1,300 they cost a similar amount to ‘permanent’ housing of the time, but the beauty of the prefab was that it could be erected in days, as an immediate solution to being without a home at all.

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