Britain Had to Build

by ANTHONY F. MERRILL

THE final score on British housing at the end of the war was 200,000 destroyed, 250,000 seriously damaged, and 4 million others cracked, chipped, and scarred. In addition to this real damage, there was hidden destruction in the complete cessation, for six years, of a building industry that had once produced as many as 300,000 new homes annually.

In 1938, Britain’s 12 million dwelling units — many of them in condemned slums — overcrowded her more than 12 million families. During the war her population rose normally, but the adults married at a more rapid rate, so that the family population soared, storing up a potential of housing difficulties for the day when the soldiers came home. In other words, Britain’s housing problems were exactly like our own except that they were proportionately higher and were seriously aggravated by war damage.

Reconstruction realists left the long-range housing needs to the statisticians. With most of the building trade in uniform and with war dislocation the apparent pattern for years to come, it was evident that the brick house which is standard in Britain would not solve any immediate housing problem.

Prefabrication seemed the only answer, and once the authorities came to that conclusion they moved with remarkable intelligence and speed. By October, 1944, Parliament had passed legislation which implemented a program for the construction of 160,000 “temporary” prefabricated houses designed to bridge the gap between immediate need and the hoped-for restoration of the home-building industry. Time and the world economic crisis were to widen this gap, but that was not at the moment foreseen.

By “temporary” the British meant a useful life of at least ten years. Actually the finished prefabricated product looks good enough for twenty and undoubtedly will be in service that long. But British prefabrication is not now confined to the temporary structures alone. Though the authorities still cling to thoughts of brick for the 5 million homes needed in the next decade or so, prefabricated elements have held the center of the stage in Britain’s permanent housing program, one in which the useful life of a dwelling is assumed to be sixty years.

The original idea was to produce a bungalow-type house for $2400, and in this endeavor the prototype “Portal house” (after Lord Portal, then Minister of Works) made its appearance. A steel-walled prefab, it never got beyond the sample stage, but it did serve to establish the pattern upon which all the British temporary units have been manufactured.

What actually arrived on the building sites was a progression of house types all based on the Portal idea of a single-story bungalow on about 650 square feet of concrete floor slab, as tightly packed a living unit as the best architects of England could devise. The houses contained two bedrooms, a living room, a large kitchen, a bath with separate toilet (British style), two storage walls, and an entrance hall large enough to permit easy access to all adjacent rooms and also provide space for the baby’s pram.

Steel looked like an ideal material until the effects of Britain’s coal shortage and Germany’s limited steel production made themselves felt in the over-all steel supply picture. Then lumber, which had been expected to trickle through from Continental supply sources, was shut off by economic complications. It was apparent that the pressure behind prefabrication also necessitated the use of new materials.

Today in England four types of temporary prefabs, ranging in cost from about $4000 to $5500, have been mass-produced. By far the most successful, and most expensive, is the aluminum house. Complete with fittings, it is entirely factory-built in converted airplane plants and is carried to the site in four sections on specially designed trucks. There is no aluminum shortage, and a steady stream of these sections has been rolling along the English highways since manufacture began. The houses assemble on the site in less than an hour, complete with utilities tied on, ready for occupancy.

Britons are willing to pay what they consider a high price for a bungalow because the design of these houses is so good that recently it was modified only slightly and redesignated “permanent.” The government promptly ordered 15,000 of these permanent dwellings for use in rural areas, where housing for agricultural workers is particularly poor, and for mining areas, where they will serve as incentives for miners and also as housing for the builders who must be moved into these areas to build new homes for the miners. One of the great deterrents in Britain’s plans for labor conscription is her inability to house the labor she may wish to conscript and send to any given area.

Next to aluminum, Britain seems to have had her greatest success with prefabricated concrete slabs, “no fines” concrete, and the asbestos materials. “No fines” concrete uses no sand, only large aggregate, and looks like expanded cinder block. The asbestos cement sheeting, corrugated and flat, which is very popular in modern Britain for siding and roofing is used in America principally for industrial installations.

The Airey house, designed by Sir Edwin Airey, is a two-story, three-bedroom house which licks the framing problem with prefabricated concrete posts. Small concrete slabs about 3 feet long and 30 inches wide are attached to these posts until a wail is built up. A crew of six men can erect one of these houses in two weeks. The Ministry of Health, which has charge of the permanent housing program, thinks so much of the Airey house that it has ordered 20,000 to be delivered within a year as part of its rural housing plan. Since almost all housing has ceased in England’s crisis, the Airey house may well prove to be the whole plan.

Another prefabricated unit is the Willoway foamed concrete house. Though foamed concrete houses are just in the bare pioneer stage in America, there is nothing startlingly new about this material. The Willoway method distinguishes itself in that it casts lightweight concrete panels to such fine tolerances that a semiskilled crew of four men can assemble the shell of a whole house with nuts, bolts, and a wrench.

The net result is that backward Britain finds herself well ahead of the United States in the mass production of prefabricated dwellings and their components. Since the war the British have completed more than 123,000 temporary pre-fabs and have 6000 more under construction. In the permanent sector, where pre-fabs are classified as “nontraditional” by a people whose taste in houses has not altered since the death of Queen Victoria, Britain has completed 14,000 pre-fabs and has about 50,000 more under construction. This makes a total of nearly 200,000 either built or now building. Though we have perhaps a wider interest in prefabrication here, nothing accomplished so far in America even approaches the British results. Our best post-war year gave us only 37,000 genuine prefabricated houses.

There are two reasons for Britain’s advanced position in this industry. She has no labor union problem and she has overcome public sentiment against mass production by manufacturing a dwelling far superior to the Victorian inheritance which houses most of her population inefficiently. The secret of her success lies almost exclusively in the prefabricated plumbing unit which is virtually standard in every British temporary house and in many of the permanent ones. It is a complete factory-built package of stove, sink, refrigerator, and wash boiler on one side of a partition, with hot-water heater, storage tank, heated clothes cupboard, bathtub, and washbowl on the other.

Before the war modern kitchens existed only for the wealthy in an England where only one house in two hundred boasted a refrigerator. Now every housewife who gets a pre-fab also gets a kitchen beyond her dreams, and as far as she is concerned, it makes the house for her. As far as the designers are concerned, it is the greatest cost-saver in the whole expense of building the new British house.

We make a similar unit in America, and a better one, but union difficulties constantly block its use. It seems to me that prefabrication has entirely shifted the emphasis of labor in the housing picture, reluctant though American labor may be to admit it. For the worker, prefabrication offers full-time, all-weather job security in place of the transient and seasonal variety which is alleged to necessitate the high wages demanded by the construction trades. More than that, prefabrication is obviously the modern low-cost method, and in periods of economic slump it may offer labor the only job opportunities in the construction field.

Perhaps the most important lesson in both British and American production-line home-building is the ability of the factory to fill the critical and growing gap in the supply of skilled workers. The labor unions themselves have failed in an ostensibly honest effort to recruit apprentices into the less socially acceptable sectors of the building trade, and they cannot meet the demand for the craftsmanship required by conventional building.

Meanwhile units are being mass-produced in England, trundled to the building site on trucks, and slipped into place with an efficiency that is heartbreaking to the frustrated American pre-fab enthusiast. There is no doubt that we can outstrip Britain in prefabrication whenever we choose, but until the consumer accepts the idea of a factory-built home and until labor sees in factory building a more steady non-seasonal form of security, the British will continue to forge ahead of their ingenious Yankee cousins in the low-cost home-building field.