Wonder who pinched my headline?! "They were built to last only 10 years but seven decades on Britain’s largest prefab estate is being celebrated with a new museum dedicated to these much-loved homes. Eddie O’Mahoney remembers clearly the moment his wife Ellen first opened the door to his home of the last 68 years. It was June 1946, he was newly demobbed from the Army and the couple had been offered this new council house. “She took one look inside and said, ‘I can get the pram in here. What a lovely hall’,” recalls Eddie. The family – they had two sons Jimmy, six, and baby Terry – had lost their LONDON HOME to a bomb five years earlier. Ellen and the children had been staying with a succession of relatives ever since. They were desperate for a place of their own. Further inspection revealed more unexpected luxuries. “A toilet – we couldn’t believe our eyes. In those days the toilet was in the garden. "A bathroom – nobody had a bathroom. You went to the municipal baths and queued up. "A kitchenette with a modern stove and a FRIDGE – we’d hardly even heard of them,” says Eddie. There were fitted wardrobes in the two bedrooms, a fold-down table in the kitchen, a BOILER, heated towel rail and a spacious sitting room with coal fire. Outside was a well-sized garden. “I remember Ellen saying, ‘Eddie, get measuring for the lino. Sign the forms, quick’.” This reaction would have delighted Winston Churchill. The O’Mahoneys’ home was one of 156,623 prefabricated bungalows – prefabs – built between 1944 and 1948 to help house the hundreds of thousands made homeless by the war. Churchill, prime minister until 1945, had originally announced the construction of 500,000 prefabs but this proved too expensive. They may have been intended as a temporary measure – to last a decade while a permanent solution was found – but these were to be HOMES FIT for the returning heroes and planning was meticulous. Top architects were tasked with their design and factories previously occupied with making armaments and planes were diverted to their manufacture. The display of the first prefab, outside the Tate Gallery in May 1944, drew huge crowds. The O’Mahoneys’ home, on the Excalibur Estate in Catford, Southeast London, was the third to be occupied of 187 prefabs eventually built there. Most are still standing and occupied. The estate is Britain’s largest remaining collection of prefabs but last year the council began demolishing them. Six have been listed by English Heritage but the rest will be knocked down over the next few years and the inhabitants rehoused. The time frame and plans for the properties to replace them are not yet known. They were built to last only 10 years but seven decades on Britain’s largest prefab estate is being celebrated with a new museum dedicated to these much-loved homes proved unsuccessful." http://www.express.co.uk/life-style/life/527252/Absolutely-Prefabulous-New-prefab-home-museum
