Today’s photo is taken from Wikipedia (despite what I stated last time) and has the author’s attribution as ‘By Peter Church, CCBY-SA20,https://commons’. It shows the Regal cinema in Ferensway, Hull, built in the 1930s by Tarran Industries and demolished in 2005 to make way for the new St. Stephen’s shopping, entertainment and eating emporium. Robert Greenwood Tarran (1892-1955) built-up from scratch a large-scale building firm based in Hull, this very active in building public buildings and airfields before, and during, the Second World War. Tarran also designed and constructed a particular type of pre-fab constructed on many sites in the mid-to-late 1940s.
During the Second World War (1939-’45) the 1930s house building initiatives came to an abrupt end. With the end of the War the country found itself in a self-same position as after the Great War, but more so as there had been much more destruction of civilian structures than had been the case 1914-’18. As in the wake of the Great War, there was a national resolve from 1945 to improve the country’s housing stock, this embodied in the form of the 1946 and 1949 Housing Acts. However, in the short term the priority had to be the repair of damaged housing and temporary homes for bombed-out families. The latter was taken-up by the commitment to building pre-fabs (s.p.b.s), these produced and erected by centrally organised businesses which had previously produced goods for the war effort, this a good example of the effectiveness of centralised economic activity in times of crisis and of the potential for prefabrication in the building industry. Pre-fabs were built in urban areas, where destruction had been greatest, rather than rural areas.
I think it is the case that no pre-fabs survive in Hull, despite their advantages (s.p.b.s) heat was rapidly lost through cavity-less walls, a weakness that could now be solved by modern construction methods.