The idea of making houses in factories has a long and chequered history of idealistic attempts and noble failure. The apparent opportunity for improved working conditions, better quality control, speed, efficiency and environmental sustainability has long attracted policymakers, designers, manufacturers and entrepreneurs. Fortunately, more recently, there have been some successes.
Henry Manning, a London carpenter, produced the Portable Cottage in 1837 for export to Australia. The Manning Cottage, as it became known, was widely advertised to appeal to British emigrants.
In the early postwar years of the last century, industrial capacity built up to supply the war effort was redirected in Britain to provide homes to replace those lost in the Blitz and to make up for the shortfall in recent development. Aneurin Bevan said at the time: “I have been looking eagerly, ever since I took office, for some system of prefabrication which would enable us to build houses in the same way as cars and aeroplanes. So far my search has been in vain, but I do
not despair.”
In 1968, the collapse of the Ronan Point tower block in a gas explosion came towards the end of an era of huge investment in prefabricated public housing in the UK. It was a time portrayed by the housing minister Richard Crossman in his Diaries of a Cabinet Minister, in which a staggering target of 500,000 new homes every year regularly came up in cabinet discussions. Ronan Point was made of prefabricated concrete panels, which were infamously jointed with wedged cigarette packets. After a gas explosion on the 18th floor, an entire corner came down like a house of cards. Shoddy construction and corrupt practice brought the mid-century experiment with mass-produced housing to a shuddering halt.
But so-called “traditional construction” has proved no less fraught with problems—the subject has been amply covered by tabloid headlines this century featuring disgruntled homebuyers living with endless snagging defects. Now, the government’s Construction Sector Deal calls for the industry to reduce construction costs by a third at the same time as halving build programmes and greenhouse gas emissions.
Clients and design and construction teams are expected to work more closely together to improve safety, quality and productivity during construction, optimise performance during the life of buildings and better our ability to upgrade and ultimately dismantle and recycle buildings.
“We should expect homes that exploit the value of modern manufacturing to be more generous”
Modular offsite manufacture is theoretically well-suited to delivering all of the outcomes required by the Construction Sector Deal, but the industry remains small, and confidence in it needs to be restored. Mike De’Ath, my colleague at HTA Design, and Mark Farmer, the government’s modular construction tsar, wrote about the opportunities and challenges in their 2020 report “Build Homes, Build Jobs, Build Innovation.” They argued that investment in offsite manufacturing could deliver all three. They also pointed out that, if factories were spread across the country, this would help the government with its “levelling up” agenda.
The De’Ath/Farmer report suggests a target of 75,000 more modular manufactured homes per year. This would be on top of the current supply aspirations of 300,000 homes per year. These homes would be delivered in such a way as to create an additional 50,000 high-quality and productive jobs. The whole programme would be designed to stimulate a national programme of research and development in offsite construction and other technologies.
To do this, government would need to re-establish joint procurement and commissioning arrangements of the sort that were once commonplace but which have withered on the vine.
So, yes, the informed view is that modular construction certainly can help Britain build more homes, and can do the job far better, faster and more sustainably than traditional construction ever could. Our own projects at HTA Design show how we can halve carbon use. We can deliver completed modules to sites more productively and safely with greatly reduced logistical complexity.
This brings us to the question of whether modernising the production of homes can deliver improvements on a scale comparable to what we have seen in other industries that have benefited from new technological capabilities. There is a real opportunity for housing in the information age to deliver so much more for households. We should expect homes that exploit the value of modern manufacturing to be more generous and adaptable, characterised by space, light and air while the internet of things advances digital convenience in the home at the rate we have experienced in
mobile telephony.
The design of these new houses doesn’t have to be dully functional. Quite the opposite—our homes at HTA Design have the solid look and feel that the nation expects of its housing. This point is endorsed by the current government’s style guru, Nicholas Boys Smith of Create Streets and author of Build Better, Build Beautiful, who says “homes with mass customisable pattern books aligned to local design codes could accelerate delivery, restore competition and increase certainty for neighbours and builders. This would be historic and it would be a good thing.”
