This new Shire Album explains the origin of the post-war British prefabricated house. In 1942 the Prime Minister Winston Churchill set up The Interdepartmental Committee on House Construction under Lord Burt. This committee favoured prefabricated housing to solve the housing crisis created by wartime bombing and sent British engineers and architects to the Tennessee valley in the USA to study American practice. It was planned to build 500,000 temporary homes as soon as the war ended and a British 'prefab' design was developed which made use of a standard service unit. This standardized unit contained a prefabricated kitchen that backed on to a bathroom, all prebuilt in a factory. Every British prefab used this same unit which contained water and waste pipes and electric distribution. This useful booklet describes and illustrates the eleven types of single-storey prefab which resulted, and gives the number of each type made. This varied from a handful for the initial Portal or Churchill design to as many as 54,500 for the Aluminium Bungalow made in Bristol. In total only about 160,000 prefabs were actually built, rather than the half million originally suggested. Building took place from 1945 to 1949 when construction was stopped.
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