Prefabs

[AndrewE]

There were/are sort-of pre-fabs in Derby made from cast iron! Post-first war, these. https://www.derby.gov.uk/news/2024/...energy-bills-and-carbon-emissions-wins-award/

The cast-iron council homes in Allenton are thought to be Derby’s oldest. They were built after the First World War using an innovative technique to address the housing shortage.

The walls of the houses were constructed from 3ft square iron plates, bolted together, earning them the nickname of “Tank Houses”. Derby was the first local authority to use this method of building on a large scale.

But the age and construction of the houses made them cold, expensive to heat and energy inefficient – with an EPC rating of band D or below.

https://www.westvillegroup.co.uk/project/derby-tank-houses-phase-1/ is an article about upgrading them

 

[Roger1973]

I seem to recall that there were still some near London Waterloo station in the early 1990s (maybe demolished to make way for the Eurostar terminal).

I don't remember any round Waterloo, but that doesn't prove anything. 1950-ish OS map doesn't obviously show any that close to the Station (again, not conclusive - map shows quite a few vacant sites.) Prefab Museum's map (which is not complete) shows some on Royal Street (north of Lambeth Palace) and some off Hatfields (north of what's now Southwark Underground) as the nearest to Waterloo Station.

Don't think they were on the site of the International Station, though - that was (apart from the 'Windsor Station') mainly railway yard that included the old lift to get carriages in and out of the Waterloo and City line. (I had a temporary job soon after leaving school in the office building on York Road where you could see that yard - although never saw the lift in use...) At the time I was there, I think the plans included demolition of that office building, which never happened.

This begs a question that hadn't occurred to me before, the provision of utilities at such sites. They would obviously have needed electricity, but what about water and sewerage?

All accounts I've seen suggest that prefabs had plumbing and indoor toilets, so they must have been connected up. under wartime emergency regulations, i suspect there wasn't much in the way of consultation about digging roads up and the like. The prefabs themselves were mostly put up on what had previously been open land, or bombed sites that had been cleared, so digging on the sites themselves would have been fairly easy.

I was very young at the time, but I still have a hazy memory of an estate of prefabs on Streatham Hill, situated at the Christchurch Road crossroads with the South Circular as recently as the late 90s/2000. There grass patch is now massively overgrown and fenced off now.

here on 1950-ish OS map. Can't say I remember them, but it wasn't quite my patch. Street View doesn't go back further than 2008 and they weren't there then.

There also used to be a Cold War era air raid siren on the site on top of a long, tall pole.

Think most dated from the 1939-45 war. The system was kept functioning during the cold war years, although latterly retained (in parts of London at least) as flood warning sirens. I can remember seeing a few around, although don't remember ever hearing them being tested.

Most were removed after the Thames Barrier was completed, there are still a few in situ (although presumably no longer in working order) - there's one at Waterloo on the railway bridge (if I've done it right, should be about centre of the screen here.)

 

[SteveP29]

Half of the council estate next to the estate I grew up in were prefabs with horizontal slabs of pebble dashed concrete.
Half the people I knew at school lived in one.
They decanted the occupants to other parts of the estate when they demolished them and replaced them with brick built houses.

My Great Aunt & Uncle lived in a semi- detached one in Great Lumley, the only street in the village that were, their slabs were vertical pebble dashed slabs.
Some were moved into a new street to allow them to demolish and rebuild with brick (on the same footprint but with a new, modern layout), families in adjoining houses in another part of the street were then offered the chance to move into the new houses. Their prefabs were then demolished and rebuilt and the process repeated.
My Uncle died in 1982 so never lived to see their new brick built house, that my Aunt moved into in about 1995. She was the last to move in the street as the couple that she lived next door to had bought their house under right to buy so it was just one person to move, rather than two households. I remember there had to be structural surveys done and paid for by the couple who bought their house for assurance that it wouldn't collapse when my Aunt's old house was demolished.

It's been around 40 and 30 years since the last of the prefabs in those locations were there and looking at it now, you just would never know that they had ever been there.