Bombsites and Prefabs

When I was a child in the sixties all the adults were always mentioning the War. The War this, the War that. “In the War ….” It was a normal topic on conversation. To us, as kids, it had a mythic status though being over long before we were born. As I grew into a teenager it seemed odd that they were still so driven by it.

As a man in my fifties looking back I begin to understand. When I do the maths the child I'm recalling must have been no more than eight which means the War had actually been over only twenty odd years and things like rationing and national service much less. Twenty odd years to the teenager still would seem to be a lifetime but twenty odd years later I look back at events from my teenage and early twenties and they seem like yesterday – and that didn't involve being bombed and losing my home nor the streets being filled with servicemen who may be off to battle tomorrow some never to return.

This blog is not about those people however, nor the War itself, but I have other memories about my youth which have echos from that time. In the early Sixties we still had bombsites to remind those adults about the war. Small parcels of land in the middle or end of a terrace boarded up and where emergency work had been done to clear the damaged buildings and weatherproof the ends of the remaining parts of the terrace with cement. Often used as dumping grounds (as such land often is) they were strewn with broken radios and fridges and the like. Kids liked the radios as the transformer cores could be broken into their laminates and they then got loads of steel “E”s which could be flicked like playing cards, as an adult I dread to think of the damage that they could have done if they'd hit someone in the eye, luckily the kids only used them to play up the wall.

Some of the old bombsites had been used to build “prefabs” however. These temporary prefabricated houses were the major part of the plan envisaged to address the post–War housing shortage. They had a planned life of up to 10 years and 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, but more expensive to build than conventional houses, and of course only being temporary, in the end, of 1.2 million new houses built from 1945 to 1951 only 156,623 prefab houses were constructed.

The ones I knew were on these cleared bombsite in terraces, a couple here an odd one there, most have now been replaced by modern houses and few survive, though that they lasted into the seventies in many cases is itself a testament to the durability of a series of housing designs and construction methods only envisaged to last 10 years.

Once a common sight in inner south London they now have to be sought out and soon you will probably have to go to a museum. The last ones I know in south London, which I used to see on my way home from work, are on a back street in East Dulwich. So the other day I set off to see if they were still there. Well a couple were, but I'm sure there were more a few years ago, and next door a new block of flats, so even here it looks like they have been reduced in number. In the pictures above and alongside you can see the remaining ones I know and the wall of the house next door rendered to protect was originally built as an internal wall.

In Catford a whole estate has gone following a long battle which you can read about here. I've also linked to the film from youtube as it shows very well the types of buildings which were once a common sight on street corners in ones and twos and now are only memories.

Laurie