Stop what you are all doing right now and take a look at this original post-war AIROH prefab for sale on the ESPC! espc.com/property/49-cr…
AIROH, or the Aircraft Industries Research Organisation House, was developed by the British aircraft industry as a way to find use for its skills and manufacturing facilities in the postwar environment
The aircraft industry primarily used aluminium, and therefore so did the AIROH house. It has been described as an "airplane in house form". It could be manufactured in sections in a factory, transported on rail or road, and assembled quickly on site by unskilled labour.
The sections themselves were built on a mechanised production line, there's an excellent description of it with lots of pictures here; medium.com/@briancpotter/…
Aluminium had its advantages; it was light, strong and - initially - readily available from scrapped aircraft. It took 2 tonnes of aluminium to build an AIROH house frame. So a single large fighter like a Typhoon might give you a house, or perhaps 3 Spitfires give you 2 houses.
But it also soon became very expensive once the initial supply of scrap was used up, and could be put to more economically productive uses. But unlike steel and concrete, it didn't suffer from corrosion, hence AIROHs are still going.
This house may be a timewarp, it's certainly been brought up to date from when it was initially built. It's about 60m^2 inside, so small but perfectly formed, and these prefabs were each given a substantial plot of land. Offers over £79k for all this?!
This looks to be 1 of quite a few on this street that escaped being recycled into aluminium cans or similar
The AIROHs were always meant to be temporary. Round the corner from this are BISF (British Iron & Steel Federation) houses, which although prefabricated were meant to be more permanent. These are in 2 different states of modernisation.
The BISF was one of the better design of prefabricated houses as I understand it. You can still find a lot of them around the place, less so the concrete ORLITs
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