In 1947 Walthamstow Council erected prefab homes in Highams Park – some of the layout of the roads is still visible in the park. These were erected to address the local post-war shortage of homes after bombing.
Three years earlier, the Churchill coalition government introduced the Housing (Temporary Accommodation) Act to provide temporary houses – there was an anticipated shortfall of 200 000 homes. The proposal was to address the shortfall by building some 500 000 pre-fabricated houses in the London County Council area with a planned lifetime of ten years and completed within five years. These houses became popularly known as ’prefabs’. They were furthermore nicknamed Palaces for the People.
At the end of the war, the new Labour government of Clement Attlee agreed to deliver 300 000 units within a decade – there was a budget of £150 million to achieve this. It was soon found that the pre-fabricated units were even dearer to build than conventional houses. Soon into the 1950s, the LCC abandoned the prefab concept in favour of bricks and mortar. Nationwide, only 156 000 prefabs were delivered.
The exact design of the prefabricated houses was left to the various manufacturers but the standard came to be that a prefab would have a small entrance hall, two bedrooms, a toilet and a bath and a kitchen. Prefab had to have a minimum floor space size of 635 square feet and had to be a maximum of 7.5 feet wide to allow them to be transported by road.
The Ministry of Works specified that all designs needed a ’service unit’: a combined back-to-back kitchen and bathroom. The bathroom included a flushing toilet and a bath with hot water taps. The kitchen would have a refrigerator, built-in oven and Baxi water heater. The prefabs had coal fires – also a back boiler for central heating and the supply of hot water. All prefabs under the housing act arrived decorated in magnolia, with gloss-green on wood surfaces, door trimmings and skirting boards.
The Highams Park Estate prefabs had their own gardens and sometimes a shed with a corrugated roof. The first winter on the Estate was that of 1947 – one of the coldest winters on record in London. This made for a notable first year.
The estate became quite a tight-knit community for those who lived there and lasted for 13 years. Most of the residents were young families – a contemporary estimate put the total number of school-age children on the estate as over 200.
There were 18 named roads on the estate: Coopersale Avenue, Coopersale Close, Fishers Avenue, Fishers Close, Miller’s End, Miller’s Close, Navestock Road, Stanford Road, Stapleford Avenue, Stapleford Central, Stapleford Crescent, Stapleford End, Stapleford Path, Stapleford Road, Troubridge Avenue, Troubridge Road, Warrens Avenue and Warrens Road.
The former Community Hall (and Sunday School) still survives as a community café called Humphry’s, named after an architect. This building pre-dated the Second World War – during the war it was both an air raid station and gun emplacement.
By the end of 1960 all the occupants had been re-housed. Before demolition in 1961, the Highams Residents Association lobbied the Council to have the area re-instated as a park.
