Your caption to a photo of postwar prefabs (Build your grand design for a humble price, 13 May) refers to “the bad old days of prefab housing”, which is about as far from the truth as it would be possible to get. These imaginative and wonderful dwellings provided an urgently needed solution to the UK’s massive postwar housing shortage and presented a huge improvement in living standards for most of their early residents, many of whom would have lost their homes during the London blitz of 1940/41.
These prefabs were undoubtedly very small, but their kitchens and bathrooms would have been a revelation to people whose previous dwellings would have had shared outside toilets and no running hot water.
My in-laws lived in central London and were not bombed but they did not get such facilities, that we today consider essential, until the London county council rehoused them in 1959. It is very easy to sneer at efforts like the introduction of these dwellings from our 21st-century expectations but all progress has to be judged against the needs of its time.
Norman Bone
Derby
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