Our homes were built & within 15 years bulldozed

Memories of the prefabs that solved post-war housing crisis

- DAMON WILKINSON

STANDING at the door of their new prefab bungalow in Heaton Park, little Sharon Tracey and dad Alfred smile for the camera in a poignant snapshot of family life in post-war Manchester. But within a few short years their home, and every other surrounding it, would be demolished.

The families and neighbours that made up the small community would be rehoused on new overspill estates across Manchester and its surrounding towns.

So what happened? Why were hundreds of new, decent homes knocked down less than 15 years after being built?

Sharon and her family - including older brother Peter and mum Jean lived in a two bed bungalow at 12 Erlmere Drive. Growing up with the largest municipal park in Europe on your doorstep was a dream, says Sharon, who was born in the front room in the winter of 1952.

"I had a tin trike when I was a little girl," she said. "We'd go out in the afternoon and come back for dinner. It was absolutely wonderful. I didn't have skin on my knees until I was about 14."

After the war Britain had a severe housing problem and prefabrication was the imaginative solution. Dubbed 'palaces for the people, more than 150,000 prefabs were flung up between 1946 and 1948 as part of an emergency programme to house bombed-out families and returning servicemen, like Sharon's dad, a tank driver in the Lancashire Fusiliers who survived D-Day.

On Thursday, December 28, 1944, the Manchester Evening News first reported on plans to build a number of prefabs around Heaton Park.