00:02I'm at the Avoncroft Museum in one of their magnificent exhibits, a prefabricated building
00:10from the 1940s. And with me is Stuart Marks, a volunteer. Stuart, what an amazing facility.
00:19Where does this date from? This is a 1947 prefab. We think about 39,000 of these were built
00:28and you can see it's pretty much a steel-framed building. It was designed, a lot of them were
00:35designed by some of the guys who built the bombers in the war and you can see the framing around
00:41and
00:41the way that the wires are threaded through the building. You can see signs of that. They were
00:49built largely to house people who had been bombed out of their homes, people who were coming out
00:57of the slums, the back-to-backs in the middle of Birmingham and so on after the war. And two
01:03nice-sized bedrooms, this living room, you've got a separate kitchen in there with a lot of mod cons,
01:09as they called them, and a separate bathroom and toilet there. So if you had been in a back-to
01:15-back
01:15in Birmingham you would have thought you were in a pretty good place. Now I believe many people didn't
01:21actually want to move out of them. No, it's very hard to move people out because I think there was
01:25a sense of the fact that these these were pretty good buildings apart from being a little bit cold
01:29in the winter and there's a sense of community around as well as people had moved out of the
01:35middle of Birmingham into these. So yeah, it was it was a tough move for people. I actually had a
01:39lady
01:40through on one of the tours recently who had lived in one of these for the first 13 years of
01:45her life
01:45and she just stood in the middle of this room and burst into tears. It was quite an interesting
01:50reaction. I don't often get that one but a lot of people remember a lot of stuff in here. The
01:55furniture, the tea trolley and the widescreen TV that was added in the 50s over there. I noticed all
02:02the furniture. I take it all this is contemporary furniture. Where did you get it from?
02:06Um, I think I think a lot of it was um was sourced from um from volunteers and and so
02:13on. I don't think
02:13we got a lot of it out of the the building when we uh we we rebuilt the building here
02:19um but quite a
02:20lot of it like this tea trolley I know is a volunteers um uh donation and I think the furniture
02:28that
02:28we're sitting on is very much a 1940s 1950s piece of furniture very solid as we've already said so.
02:34It's absolutely amazing when you actually come into a building like this and I know some
02:37have been kept in Birmingham because people just wanted to buy them and not get rid of them and I
02:42think
02:42there's an interesting lesson to be heard learned here from the 1940s. We have a housing crisis at
02:47the moment a problem and yet in the 1940s they came close to solving that problem with prefabrication.
02:55Perhaps this is a lesson we can learn.
