Emergency Factory Made

Prefabs (prefabricated houses) were a major part of the delivery plan to address the United Kingdom's post–Second World War housing shortage. They were envisaged by war-time prime minister Winston Churchill in March 1944, and legally outlined in the Housing (Temporary Accommodation) Act 1944.

Taking the details of the public housing plan from the output of the Burt Committee formed in 1942, the wartime coalition government under Churchill proposed to address the need for an anticipated 200,000 shortfall in post-war housing stock, by building 500,000 prefabricated houses, with a planned life of up to 10 years, within five years of the end of the Second World War. The eventual bill of state law, agreed under the post-war Labour government of Prime Minister Clement Attlee, agreed to deliver 300,000 units within 10 years, within a budget of £150 million.

Through use of the wartime production facilities and creation of common standards developed by the Ministry of Works, the programme got off to a good start and, of 1.2 million new houses built between 1945 and 1951 when the programme officially ended, only 156,623 prefab houses were constructed. Today, a number survive, a testament to the durability of a series of housing designs and construction methods only envisaged to last 10 years. On the back of this scheme local authorities developed non-traditional building techniques, which included some prefabrication, notably pre-cast reinforced concrete (PRC), to fulfil the underestimated demand.

The combined impact of war and a lack of materials had a huge impact on the volume and quality of available housing stock. Contemporary estimates suggest that there was a shortage of 200,000 houses nationally. The result was the repeat of a strategy deployed by the government following the First World War, namely a country-wide investment programme in a national public house building scheme.

To tackle the problem Prime Minister Winston Churchill set up the cross-party Burt Committee in 1942, which sent British engineers to the United States the following year to investigate how America – one of the main wartime advocates of prefabricated construction – intended to address its needs for post-war housing.

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