Prefabricated bamboo houses: a social response in Myanmar
The innovation lies in the use of small-diameter bamboo beams, a material often considered waste.

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Modular and prefabricated recreational architecture
A design that meets economic criteria and the idea of agile construction through modular prefabrication.

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Steel in the Suburbs: the thread about Lochend’s controvertial Steel Houses

There’s a quiet and well-kept little corner of the Lochend Housing Scheme that is a bit different from the rest. Its houses look distinctly municipal (although they were never “council”), but they are at a lower density than other parts of the scheme; there are bungalows and there are no tenements. You wouldn’t know it to look at it, but underneath the modern external insulation and pebbledash, all of these houses are steel houses. Lets find out how these houses came to be and what sort of houses they are.

In February 1926 the Scottish National Housing Company Ltd. (SNHC) formed a new subsidiary to provide 2,000 steel houses for Scotland; the imaginatively named Second Scottish National Housing Company (Housing Trust) Ltd., (SSNHCHT). The objective of this was to quickly build new housing in areas that needed it, without either making demands on the skilled labour market or the material supply of the traditional building trade; bricks, stone, plaster and cement. By producing the houses out of prefabricated steel components, idle engineering workers could be employed; unskilled workers could quickly erect the houses on prepared sites and there would not be a significant drain on building materials. A further consideration was that there was a deep recession in the Scottish shipbuilding industry, which was projected to last for some years further. By extension, this impacted the wider engineering, steel and coal industries, and Scotland’s industrialists and a number of politicians saw steel houses as a stimulus for these sectors.

The SNHC had been set up in September 1914 to built housing on land owned by the Admiralty adjacent to the new Rosyth Dockyard. Its stated objective was “to carry on the business of housing, town-planning and garden city making” i.e. to develop the Rosyth Garden City for let to dockyard workers. It was arranged along the lines of a public utility company, with dividend limited to 5% and a board stuffed with the worthies of local government of Scotland, including the Lord Provosts of Glasgow and Edinburgh. During the war, they would go on to build some 1,872 houses at Rosyth.

The capital for the SSNHCHT steel house programme of the was provided by the government – 50% from the Public Works Loan Board and 50% from the Scottish Board of Health (at a rate of 5% interest, this scheme had to pay itself back!). Its time-scales were ambitious, with only 2 years were allowed to complete and there a £40 penalty for each house that failed to meet its scheduled delivery date. To keep labour demands down, only 10% of the workforce could be from the skilled trades, with penalties for exceeding this proportion. Houses were allocated to the main centres of population, including 750 for Glasgow, 350 for Edinburgh and 300 for Dundee. Five approved types were ordered; 1,000 Weir Houses (in 3 variants), 500 Atholl Houses and 500 Cowieson Houses. The SSNHCHT had to abide by local building regulations and have their proposals approved by the Dean of Guild Courts (the equivalent then of a planning committee). Rents were set to local equivalents and factoring was handled by local agents – in Edinburgh this was Gumley & Davidson. All of the steel houses had coal fires as the only source of heating and hot water and were lit by gas; electricity was ruled out as an economy.

Steel houses were not without controversy – indeed the government’s initial offer had been a £40 per house subsidy to local authorities that ordered and constructed their own such houses; none had taken it up, which was why they turned to the SNHC. The prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, had to intervene due to the controversy and made the provision of steel houses something of a campaign promise. Mrs Baldwin offered to personally live in one for a month to demonstrate how satisfactory they were.

The socialist movement faced the question of whether to resist them on account of their perceived lack of quality and the labour practices involved in their manufacture versus accepting them as a cheap way to quickly provide modern new houses for slum clearance. This caused a substantial rift at the time; John Wheatley MP (who as Minister of Health had been behind the “Homes for Heroes” council houses of the 1919 programme) spoke unfavourably of them: “the people [do] not want steel houses. [I have] yet to learn that a single one of the thousands who had bought their own houses had ordered a steel house“. The building trades were unhappy that workers employed in fabrication at the factories undercut their rates and that only 10% of the labour could come from their members. Mr Hicks of the Building Trades Union condemned them as “shoddy and insanitary“. His union was in turn accused of protectionism and of trying to prevent underemployed engineering workers and casual labourers from getting steady work on fabricating the houses.

There was also official prejudice against steel houses within Edinburgh; Baillie Mancor of the Town Council said the council wanted “real houses” and not steel houses; Councillor Mrs Eltringham Miller said that these houses were “a gift, and they were not looking forward to what they would cost after they had them.” Councillor Hardie went further and said that these were “shoddy building substitutes” and that the state was adopting a “Mussolini attitude” in forcing steel houses upon local authorities. Nevertheless, the Housing and Planning Committee approved sites in Edinburgh for the scheme on land they had already laid out for municipal housing. 250 were to go to Lochend, where 23 acres were transferred to the SSNHCHT and 100 to the Wardie district; additional land was reserved at Saughton as the Corporation desired 500 steel houses in total and was keen to encourage the SSNHCHT in any way it could.

Work progressed quickly; in July 1926 it was reported that “satisfactory progress” was being made and that the new houses were proving popular with applicants. By August, groundworks were complete and houses were beginning to rise from the ground; many more applications for let were being received every day. Rents were set at £22 per annum for cottage flats, £28/10 for the bungalows and £34 for semi detached houses. In November 1926, The Scotsman reported that the Lochend steel houses were nearing completion, with “quite a batch of Weir houses ready now, and men at work on the gardens, shovelling a rich, dark soil, which augurs well for the gardens of the future.” The paper observed that the houses were “more than empty: they have never been inhabited” and that it was with the “coming of the people and the gardens that they will acquire a personality.”

Lochend was allocated all 5 available types under the scheme, laid out in typical garden city style, the streets taking the name “Findlay” from John R. Findlay, Bt., chairman of the SSNHCHT (the steel houses at Wardie were given the streetnames “Fraser” from Provost Fraser of Dunfermline, who was on the board of directors).

Atholl Cottage Flat

These houses were produced by the Atholl Steel House Company and named after one of its founding partners, the Duke of Atholl, who had envisaged building a steel house in 1919 after touring the idle shipyards of the Clyde. He partnered with the industrialist William Beardmore, whose shipyard and locomotive works were desperate for work, with his steel foundry at Mossend in Lanarkshire ready to provide the plates. Also known as “4 in a block” houses, this style was very popular with the 1920s public housing schemes, offering a good balance between reducing building and population density, construction costs and giving each household its own entry door and garden.

Atholl’s original house was to be a lodge for his own estate, and as such was designed and built to be permanent. The construction of the Atholl House was therefore more substantial than its competitors, requiring 3 to 4 times as much steel. These heavyweight steel walls were load bearing, providing rigidity to the steel framework to which they were attached and therefore no internal cross-bracing was required. The steel was coated on its inner face with granulated cork to prevent condensation and then lined with composite boards, which were painted or wallpapered, eliminating the need for plasterers. Atholl estimated the lifespan of his house to be 60 to 90 years, with that of the Weir and Cowieson being 40 years.

The Weir Houses were produced by G. & J. Weir, engineers to the shipbuilding industry at the Holm Foundry in Cathcart in Glasgow. Weir’s chairman, Viscount Weir, had a particular interest in the idea of prefabricated houses and they would be something the company returned to on numerous occasions. Those of the 1926 scheme were of three distinct types, but all used the same basic structure, of a load bearing timber frame and floors to which a relatively thin skin of steel plates was attached as an external cladding. Their lighter construction and lower labour costs than other steel houses meant that they were the cheapest, and Weirs therefore got 50% of the total order for the scheme. A feature of all Weir houses was exposed internal copper plumbing; it could not easily be buried within the walls or their thin insulation layer, and Lord Weir felt it was better to make it accessible for repairs, so was simply clipped along the inner partitions. The Weir Paragon House of 1944 inherited this design feature.

In 1925, Weirs built a demonstration steel bungalow in Grosvenor Square in just 10 days:

The Weir Houses were the most controversial of the steel houses as Weirs paid their workers at the rates of the engineering trades from which they were drawn, which were lower than those of the building trades. Weirs were accused of building “steel houses of a very inferior kind by paying low wages under sweated conditions“. In an editorial, The Scotsman called them “a pig in a poke” (an unknown entity) but that people would want to live in them anyway and prevailed upon Weirs to improve their wages. Atholl avoided this scandal by paying building trades rates to their prefabrication workers in the factories.

Weir Eastwood Bungalow

The correspondent from The Scotsman who was sent to review the house noted that “the Living room is a good size, and the kitchenette or scullery is larger than that of many a modern brick house. The two bedrooms are a sensible shape“. The Eastwood, like its siblings, featured lots of built-in storage cupboards and a built-in coal bunker in the kitchen. The price, excluding groundworks, was set at £365 per house.

Weir Douglas Semi-Detached House

The Douglas was the largest of the Weir Houses and was a semi-detached, two-storey cottage house. The ground floor contained a sitting room with “handsome fireplace”, kitchen, larder, bathroom and – something of a novelty for the time – a large under-stairs cupboard. Upstairs were the three bedrooms, with the master bedroom running the full width of the house and having an unusually wide casement window to the front. This was the only house of the programme that had 3 bedrooms; all the other having 2. The price, excluding groundworks, was £390 per house.

Weir Blanefield Cottage Flat

This was the cottage flat in the in the Weir range. It was basically a 2-storeyed version of the Eastwood Bungalow with the upper flats accessed by internal staircases accessed from the side. The upstairs kitchens had floors strengthened with timber laid on a damp-proof layer to protect the steel beneath from “the vigorous scrubbings” of the housewife. The price, excluding ground works, was set at £357 per house.

Cowieson Terraced House

F. D. Cowieson had trained as an architect, but found success in prefabricated wood and iron buildings, with the company based in St. Rollox in Glasgow. Initially these were simple agricultural structures such as barns and sheds, but soon the company was offering halls and huts, pavilions and even cinemas. During WW1 the company turned to building bus and lorry bodies – particularly ambulances – and they would later become much better known for this side of the business. They also experimented with “brieze block” houses, a single pair of which were trialled in Edinburgh at the Riversdale Demonstration Site.

The Cowieson Houses built in the programme were of a four-in-a-block terrace and like the Weir Houses, used a load bearing wooden structure to which a steel cladding was applied. The roof was originally asbestos tiles.

In July 1927, Lochend was proudly exhibited to King George V and Queen Mary, who made a royal visit on 11th of that month. Before proceeding to Lochend, the visitors stopped at the Corporation’s newest housing scheme at Prestonfield, where the King and Queen each planted a tree to inaugurate the development. They then headed to Lochend through the Holyrood Park, with 35,000 school children turned out to line the route. Further crowds greeted them at Lochend and they made a slow drive through the new neighbourhood, guided by Lord Provost Stevenson and two councillors.

Their majesties expressed pleasure at the fine layout of this garden city and were greatly interested in the many types of construction in evidence as well as the openness of the place and tasteful arrangement of the gardens.

A halt was made at 49 Findlay Gardens, a Weir bungalow, where an inspection was made of the house occupied by the Hill family and their two young children. Mr Hill’s occupation was given as the manager of an egg merchant, T. Howden & Co., in Leith, which gives an idea of the sort of persons who were living in the houses. The residents were asked if the house had been cold in winter; yes it had been, but it was not now (it was July!). The next house to be inspected was the Atholl House of Mrs Wilson at 7 Findlay Medway, where they remarked on the sensible layout of the interior and were intrigued by a bed settee in the living room, the Queen sat on it and plumped up the cushions.

The householders were apparently not informed in advance that they were about to receive their guests and the first thing they knew was the knock on the door from the police. One of the housewives was reputedly peeling potatoes when they arrived and said of the Queen: “She’s a verra hamely lady” and that “Ye hav’na much crack for folk o’ that kind, and ye’re a bit tongue-tacket, but she was that kind and natural, and said everything was very nice“.

On leaving the steel houses, the royal party then proceeded to some of the Airey Duo-slab houses; Mr & Mrs Galloway at 58 Lochend Avenue and Mrs Dickson at 34 Lochend Drive.

In the end, an additional 500 steel houses were erected by the SSNHCHT above and beyond its original target, taking the total to 2,252. All were completed by the end of 1928 and the stock, along with those at Lochend, was passed to the ownership and management of the Scottish Special Housing Agency in 1963 when it took over the assets of the Scottish National Housing companies. Although they were only given a 40-60 year lifespan by their builders, most were first refurbished between 1978 and 1983 and in 3 years time they will have their centenary. Nearly all are still standing and most have been substantially upgraded with external insulation and rendering, double glazing, central heating, new roofs etc. A handful remain in an earlier state, usually those that had been bought very early under “right to buy” legislation. The tenants of those that were not bought early campaigned to have them upgraded rather than demolished, and most of those were subsequently bought (it was not possible to buy a defective house).

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How the dream of a suburban New Town went sour: the thread about Wester Hailes

Wester Hailes is a name often used (from outwith) to describe the whole area, but really it’s a set of discreet neighbourhoods, each with their own name with its own derivation. We covered Clovenstone in our last thread, so let’s look at some of the others in turn.

Wester Hailes

Let’s start with Wester Hailes itself. Hailes is a really ancient name, almost 1,000 years old, first recorded in the area in 1095 when Ethelred, son of Malcolm Canmore, gave land in this area called Halas to Dunfermline Abbey. It likely refers to land by, or between, river(s). The estate of Hailes was split into three main parts by the 15th century

Blaeu’s map of 1654 shows the East and West Hales between the two watercourses which may give the area its name; the Murray Burn to the north and the Water of Leith to the south. Fast forward to an Ordnance Survey 6 inch map of 1852 and we see a farm of Wester Hailes (where Clovenstone housing scheme is now centred), a quarry village at Hailes, just south of Kingsknowe – where Hailes Quarry Park now is, and Hailes House, which is still hiding there off the Lanark Road surrounded by streets of its name, if you look for it.

It was Wester Hailes Farm and Hailes Quarry (which had been reclaimed by backfilling with landfill) that the Corporation would purchase in the 1960s for its new housing scheme and from where the overall name was taken. The Wester Hailes Road though was first built and so-named over 30 years before in 1931, to connect Lanark and Calder Road.

Dumbryden

But it was the name of Dumbryden which was applied to the first part of the scheme to be built, in the northeast corner on a mix of land formerly occupied by quarry cottages and also the Wester Hailes Smallholdings. Dumbeg and Dumbryden are old Gaelic-derived names in this area. Dumbryden itself (or Dumbredin, Dumbraiden , Dumbrydon etc.) probably means the same thing as Dumbarton – township or fort of Britons. A farm of this name is recorded in 18th century maps. As such, it’s an ancient name and a remarkable survivor in the streets of a 20th century council scheme.

That building that you know and love as Lothian Buses’ Longstone Depot? It was actually built in 1949 as the administrative block for the Dumbryden Works of John Wight & Co., building contractors. The Corporation didn’t acquire it for conversion to a bus garage until 1954.

Murrayburn

Next along from Dumbryden is Murrayburn, built from 1969-72. It takes its name from the Murray Burn, the stream that once flowed through this area and which, ironically, was buried in a conduit to make way for the housing scheme!

You can catch sight of the Murray Burn at Sighthill, where it passes under the Union Canal below you, before entering its culvert under the district which it lends its name to. The name is a corruption of the Scots Muiryburn, a burn that drains a muir (moor). Confusingly, much like Wester Hailes Primary School was actually in Sighthill, so is Murrayburn Primary School! It was built there in 1938, 30 years before the neighbourhood that shares its name.

Hailesland

Immediately adjacent to Murrayburn and Dumbryden sits Hailesland, with the union canal running through its centre. It was a name coined by the council planners back in 1967 on an area of Wester Hailes Farm that had been known as the Dryburn Park.

The northern part of Hailesland is a mix of low and mid-rise properties, the part south of the Canal was built as high rise, using the Bison Wall Frame System. These were condemned as structurally unsafe in 1983 and demolition was recommended then. Six such blocks were built at Hailesland and they were never fully occupied. They became the centre of a 20 year local (and occasionally national) housing scandal that was not resolved until 1989. After years of wrangling, the eventual outcome saw three of the blocks refurbished (and clad in distinctive, corrugated, coloured exteriors) and have their structural defects remedied and the remaining three blocks sold to the Wester Hailes Housing Association for a token £1 and demolished.

In 1989, the value of these three blocks, standing empty at the time, was assessed. It was found to be negative £500,000; such were the costs faced in disposing or repairing them, the council would have to pay the housing association to take them of fits hands. All six blocks would likely have been demolished if it wasn’t for the fact they were so new (less than 17 years since final completion) that they hadn’t yet been paid off and the council still owed £1.5 million of debt taken on to finance their construction. Writing that off would have resulted in the sum having been added to city-wide council housing rents. 

Demolition started on June 11th 1990; three blocks consisting of 339 flats, were brought down to be replaced by 98 low-rise housing association properties. The plunger was pressed by Scottish Secretary Malcolm Rifkind and Tommy Smith, a saxophonist and jazz composer who grew up in the area

Westburn

The westernmost area of Wester Hailes is appropriately enough known as Westburn . The name for this area was historically Baberton Mains, after a farm, with the old Baberton Quarry at its centre. But the name Baberton had been taken by a private housing estate built on neighbouring Fernieflat Farm, so a new name was conjured up by the council for their project. Westburn refers of course to land to the west of the Murray Burn. Again it was a mix of low, mid and seven blocks comprising of 400 high-rise flats. These multis weren’t Bison System, but had actually been built to an even worse quality than those at Hailesland. Not long after completion, the external roughcasting started to fall off, and huge sections had to be pre-emptively removed as a safety concern, leaving the relatively new flats “piebald“; looking like they had been abandoned for decades.

£300,000 was spent on render repairs at Westburn in 1987, but the end was nigh for them. Its seven blocks came down in March 1993, when they were just over 20 years old, to be replaced by the Westburn Village of the Wester Hailes Housing Association.

The Drive, Park and Barn Park

The last neighbourhood of Wester Hailes is the bit you might get away with calling just that – although it was built in three distinct parts; Wester Hailes Drive (tower blocks), Wester Hailes Park and Barn Park.

These multis were demolished in 1994 to make way for low-rise housing. At the same time the opportunity was taken to create new, pastoral-sounding streetnames to recall the vanished farm; Harvesters Way, Winterburn Place, Ashcroft Lane etc. Another of the rehabilitated areas was renamed Dumbeg Park, bringing back into use another of the ancient Gaelic placenames (one meaning a little fort or settlement – dun beag) The various demolition and replacement schemes were remarkably successful, and won various awards at the time including “most improved street” in the country for the part of Wester Hailes Drive renamed Walkers Rigg. . This was in no part due to the community involvement in planning.

The more you read about Wester Hailes, the more you realise just how badly people were let down by the authorities. The shopping centre that had originally been planned as a high street in the centre of the scheme did not open until the last houses were being complete din 1973, more than five years after people started moving into the scheme. In the meantime it had been meant long walks or awkward bus rides to go shopping.

This “get people in first, worry about everything else later” approach also applied to education. It took nearly a decade for the promised secondary school for the area, Wester Hailes Education Centre (WHEC), to materialise, it did not open until 1977 by which time students were well settled into other schools and parents had to fight the authorities to keep them there.

In 1978 the area had a single GP “surgery” serving c. 20,000 people – in reality it was a few rooms in a converted tower block flat in Hailesland; the Health Secretary allowed it to be closed. Damp, condensation and mould as a result of design and construction flaws and poor workmanship was endemic from new. When residents protested at a meeting of the Housing Committee in the City Chambers in 1977 the Chairman, Councillor Cornelius Waugh (“Corny“), had officers eject them.

George Younger, Scottish Secretary, turned down demands for a public enquiry. Eventually in 1981 the Edinburgh District Council commissioned a report into construction problems in the scheme from Paisley College of Technology, known as the “MacData Report“, after the research unit which produced it. This was a technical report and went through the estate forensically examining construction and engineering standards. It found a litany of errors and clear evidence of shoddy workmanship and a lack of supervision. But locals felt it didn’t go far enough – it was authored by building surveyors and civil engineers and overlooked the people themselves. In response, the local tenants groups set up their own “People’s Survey” through the Wester Hailes Sentinel newspaper. The Sentinel’s surveys were sent to each of the 5,941 houses that comprised the entire scheme. 80% of the respondents complained of draughts; 54% complained of damp. Houses had cracks in floors, walls and ceilings, doors and windows jammed or were improperly sealed.

As a result, the wind and rain got in. Two thirds of respondents complained of the noise of the wind in their houses. Skimping on insulation to cut costs meant 3/4 struggled to keep houses heated in winter. Water vapour condensed on cold walls the walls and ran down it. The survey also found:

• 472 complaints of noise from up or downstairs neighbours due to inadequate soundproofing
• 412 complaints of noise from the common stairs and 342 of banging internal doors
• 466 cracks in floors or ceilings
• 307 leaks and plumbing defects

But what little was done didn’t touch the sides. You’ll find the same complaints in the newspapers in 1985 and 1986 and 1988 as you did in 1978. The application of fungicidal paint by Council workmen, the typical response to complaints, did nothing.

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Advances in prefabricated housing
Prefabricated construction provides sustainable, efficient and highly customizable solutions. 🏡

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It might look like many other quiet, leafy, post-war suburban streets in Edinburgh, or anywhere at all really, but there’s something very special about Sighthill Neuk and its surrounding streets. If you were to wander around, most of the houses would feel familiar to you. You’ve probably seen them – or ones very like them – before. You’ve probably been seeing them all your life. But look again. No two blocks of houses here are the same. Every single one is different. In fact, some of them are totally unique.

That is because this just isn’t any old street, this is the Sighthill Demonstration Site; a testing ground and living laboratory for post-war public housing experiments for Scotland. Between 1944 and 1965, 69 houses were built to 20 different designs and construction methods in a scheme supervised by the Scottish Special Housing Association, the SSHA. This public agency was formed in Edinburgh in 1937 to provide good quality public housing in Scotland to supplement that constructed by Local Authorities.

At Sighthill, they tested out the latest innovations in building materials, construction techniques, internal configurations, plumbing, heating and more, with the intention of building better and cheaper municipal housing. These houses were demonstrated to local authorities, their architects and contractors, who would go on to build many thousands of houses of the sorts trialled at Sighthill. SSHA staff lived in the houses and reported back on how they performed and what they were like to live in. Most of the houses were later sold on to the SSHA staff who lived in them, and who by accounts were very pleased with them; indeed all but one of the demonstration houses survive to this day and all are very well kept.

However, such was the crash-building nature of the post-war public housing construction boom, unfortunately many mistakes were made before the lessons from Sighthill had been learned. For instance, the Scottish prototype of the Orlit System framed house was built here in 1946 and many thousands were built all over Scotland by the time it became apparent in 1950 that it was a flawed system that produced defective houses. This thread explores each type of house in the Demonstration Site and what makes each special.

20. Weir Paragon House

We start with number 20 because this was the first house built at the Sighthill Demonstration Site. It was also the first post-war prefabricated house built in Scotland (in fact it was completed before the end of the war!) and is the only one which has been demolished – although it was intended to be a permanent structure.

The Weir Paragon House was a prefabricated house with a steel frame, walls and roof. It was a single-storey, detached, modernist cottage coated externally with a weatherproof layer of harling and paint. It was of an E-shape plan, with one “wing” of the house containing the bedrooms and the other the living room, kitchen and a utility room. The first and second prototypes were erected within G. & J. Weir’s factory in Glasgow, the third was sent to Sighthill as its opening showpiece. It was ready to be opened to the public by Viscount Weir on July 21st 1944, just 45 days after Allied forces had landed on the Normandy Beaches. 100 of these houses were built during wartime, for use in rural and mining areas of Scotland to ease a housing crisis in those districts.

The heating worked off a solid-fuel boiler that produced hot water for radiators. All the pipe-work was exposed as a utility measure so that it did not need to be buried within walls. The doors were sliding instead of hinged, to reduce the space needed to open a door. A feature of the house, to reduce unnecessary waste, was there were no internal door locks and a novel system of push-button door handles. Viscount Weir reasoned that “there must be 80 million locks and handles on room doors in Scottish houses” and that that locks were never used and the handles had too many moving parts.

The second house, known as Kendeugh, had been built in the grounds of the Weir Sports Fields next to their Holm Foundry factory in Cathcart. It survived in good condition as a private residence until mid-2022 in Glasgow, at which point it was unceremoniously demolished.

1. Department of Health for Scotland Timber Economy Houses

These houses weren’t built from timber, rather they were built to try and economise the use of softwood timber as there was a fear that due to the UK’s economic conditions, building timber would be too expensive to import. There were built for the Department of Health for Scotland by the SSHA. Each of the four houses in the terrace used a different proportion of timber compared to a standard British house of the same size; 0% standard timber use, 25%, 67% and 92%. These houses were modified from a design prepared in England and one of the space-saving features was an “aggregate ground floor living space“; the living room, kitchen and dining room were open plan. These were the first mass-market first houses in Scotland to feature this.

The structural walls were of standard brick and block construction, but internal partitions were pre-cast plaster or concrete panels or blocks. The roofs used either hardwood or steel frames rather than softwood. The floor structures were pre-cast concrete beams, in-filled with concrete on the ground floor. The first floor differed from house to house.

2. Ministry of Works / Ministry of Housing & Local Government Timber Economy Houses

These houses were built for the same reasons as the DHfS Timber Economy Houses, but were sponsored by the Ministry of Works and the Ministry of Housing & Local Government. They were based on designs for the new towns of Cwmbran, Harlow and Peterlee, modified to suit Scottish standards. They were of traditional construction but used a variety of non-traditional roofing, flooring and internal partitions (pre-cast concrete, plasterboard, hardwood and even plastic tile flooring) to reduce softwood requirements. Eight houses in total were built; a semi-detached house, a 4-in-a-block terrace and a detached upper/lower flat were built.

3. Department of Health for Scotland Space Saving Flats

The “Space Saving” houses aimed to reduce the costs of housing construction by reducing aspects of the internal sizing and configuration, but particularly the amount of space devoted to the actual supporting structure of the building. This block of flats was inspired by the visit of a Minister of the Scottish Office to Holland in 1951, which impressed upon them features of Dutch housing that were more economical than traditional Scottish practices. This 3-storey block had 3 stairs, each with 6 flats, for 18 houses. The main novelty was the use of stronger bricks that were thinner bricks and resulted in a lighter structure; the traditional 16 inch thick walls used for flats in Scotland was reduced by 1/3 to 11 inches. This meant each flat required 13,700 bricks, compared to 17-21,000 for similar flats of traditional construction and the press reported the unveiling of these flats under the headline “Thinner Walls for Cheaper Flats!”.

Further economies were gained by reducing the sizes of the bedrooms was reduced and in a third of the houses there was no internal hallway; bedrooms and bathrooms lead off the living room. To reduce softwood use, the roofing structure was as light as was permitted and all joists were no longer than 8″ thick timber would allow. A final innovation was to combine the soil (toilet) and waste (sink) drains together, one of the first times this had been tried in Scotland.

4. Department of Health for Scotland Space Saving Cottages

Like the DHfS Space Saving Flats, these cottages reduced the internal space and the volume of building materials required for traditional construction to demonstrate the principals to Local Authorities. They dispensed with the traditional “pend” that gave access to back gardens through a terrace as this was otherwise unused space and replaced it with an utility room, giving through access internally. Hallways were kept as small as possible to maximise the internal space devoted to living space. Bedrooms were reduced in size and no built-in cupboards or recesses were included in them; this space was reallocated to the kitchen and living room. A controversial change was reducing the 8 foot standard ceiling height by 3 inches on the ground floor and 6 inches upstairs. These houses were 90 square feet (8.3m2) smaller than the equivalent houses of the time, for no loss of living space.

5. Weir Timber Houses

Weirs had been interested in prefabricated housing since Lord Weir’s “Steel Houses” of which 500 were built in Scotland after WW1. Weir Housing Corporation produced the prototype Paragon Steel House at Sighthill in 1944 and in 1951 won an SSHA competition to design a new standard, prefabricated timber house. The prototype was erected here to demonstrate it before 3,000 were supplied from Weir’s factory in Coatbridge for use by the SSHA across Scotland. The first production houses were a scheme of 18 in Kirkintilloch, the first of which was ready in December 1952 after taking only 6 weeks to complete. Due to restrictions on timber imports, 3,000 was the limit of the number of houses that could be built.

6. SSHA Bellrock House & 7. Orlit Bellrock House

Houses 6 and 7 were two semi-detached, two-storey houses built to trial the use of Bellrock load-bearing gypsum wall panels for the internal partitions. One was built to an SSHA design, the other to the Orlit System of prefabricated concrete frames and interlocking cladding blocks. It was unusual for an Orlit house in that the roof was gabled and not hipped (the sides are straight, when viewed from the front, with the external wall meeting the peak of the roof at the top). The SSHA house had an unusual construction method, with the gypsum panels going up first and acting as shuttering, with reinforced concrete being poured between them to form the load-bearing structure. It is a one-of-a-kind prototype and the SSHA built no more of them.

8, 9 & 10. Ministry of Fuel & Power Heating Demonstration Houses

These three semi-detached houses were built in 1949-50 to demonstrate three different new space-heating systems for the Ministry of Fuel and Power. They were supervised and monitored by the Fuel Research Station in East Kilbride. Two used coal-fired boilers; one a hot air system and the other a low-pressure water system with conventional radiators. The third used a gas-fired, warm air system with outlets in all rooms.

The houses themselves were identical inside (to allow comparison between the three systems) and were of traditional construction to the designs of the SSHA as contractor to the Department.

11. Miller-O’Sullivan House

The Miller-O’Sullivan House was a collaboration between James Miller – an Edinburgh-based volume housebuilder who had specialised in small, semi-detached, middle class housing infill sites in the interwar period – and Edward O’ Sullivan, a building contractor to London County Council who specialised in concrete block houses. Both companies had developed their own non-standard construction housing designs. This house used a special machine on-site to pour concrete into moulds to form the components, with a steel spine beam tying it together internally. The outside was roughcast.

12. Atholl Steel House

The Atholl House was named after its builders the Atholl Steel House Company of Mossend in Lanarkshire (named after the Duke of Atholl, one of the company’s founders). The company had built prefabricated steel houses in the inter-war period for public housing schemes; 550 of which were erected in Scotland. An updated steel house design, based on their 1926 model, had already been put into production for England in 1945 and was modified for construction in Scotland. A prototype semi-detached house of the Scottish variant was built at Sighthill in 1946 for the SSHA and DhFS. These houses are a steel frame, covered in harled and painted steel panels with a corrugated steel roof. Steel house production was suspended in 1948 after 1,500 Atholl Houses had been completed due to the post-war economic crisis and a crash in the domestic supply of steel in the country.

13. Holland, Hannen & Cubitts Foamslag Block House

This semi-detached house was built in 1944 by one of England’s principal engineering contractors who were a specialist in concrete construction. The technique was traditional, being built of blockwork, but the materials were not. Foamslag was a lightweight concrete building block that had been developed in 1938 by the Department of Housing Research Section using the by-product of steel manufacturing.

14. Canadian Timber House

The last demonstration houses to be built at Sighthill by the SSHA, these were one of three sites sponsored in the UK by the Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation of Ottawa, Canada. They were the result of a 1963 visit to Canada by British housing officials to investigate Canadian pre-fabricated housing techniques. The timber components were imported from Canada. They could clad with brick, timber or render on metal lath; one of the Sighthill houses has a Fyfestone synthetic stone block finish.

15. Holland, Hannen & Cubitts Poured Foamslag House

This was a version of the other Holland, Hannen & Cubitts house at Sighthill, but instead of being built from blocks it was poured in-situ into prefabricated shuttering. Very few of these houses were ever built.

16. Orlit Frameless House

This was the prototype of the Orlit Frameless House which was developed when it became apparent that the pre-cast, reinforced concrete (PRC) frames of the Orlit System houses were a major structural weakness when they began to suffer corrosion. Orlit set up the Scottish Construction Company to built these houses as the Scotcon Orlit and many thousands were erected by the SSHA and Scottish local authorities in the 1950s. They do not suffer from the same deficiencies as the Orlit System houses. You can read more about the different Orlit houses in the thread about Post-War, Prefabricated, Permanent housing in Edinburgh.

17. Orlit Framed House

This was the prototype in Scotland of the Orlit Framed House, built to the Orlit System of the Czech architect Edwin Katona. This used a system of PRC frames and columns which were infilled with special interlocking concrete blocks. The houses at Sighthill were finished with brick porches and a pitched roof, most Orlit System houses were much more utilitarian in appearance and had a flat roof. Many thousand of these houses were built by the SSHA and local authorities in Scotland prior to 1950, before it became clear that the system suffered from structural weaknesses when the PRC began to corrode prematurely at the joints. Designated as defective, many of these houses have since been demolished but you can still find them around Edinburgh. You can read more about the different Orlit houses in the thread about Post-War, Prefabricated, Permanent housing in Edinburgh.

18. Keyhouse Unibuilt House

This is the only house of this type that was built in Scotland. It is a steel house, with a steel frame and cladding and glasswool and plasterboard internal lining. Like other steel houses, construction was curtailed by the government in 1948 due to a severe shortages of domestic steel and few of these were ever built. They were built for the Ministry of Works by a consortium of J. Brockhouse & Co., engineers; Joseph Sankey & Sons, sheet metal stampers; and Gyproc Products, plasterboard manufacturers.

19. SSHA No-Fines House

This was a prototype of a No-Fines house for the SSHA, built in 1946. No-Fines refers to concrete produced with no sand component (the fine material of the aggregate); just gravel and cement. With no sand to fully fill in the gaps between the gravel, it is a breathable material. It began being used for public housing in the inter-war period and interest arose again post-war as it did not require the specialist skill of bricklaying. Local authorities in Scotland and the SSHA built extensively in No-Fines into the 1970s. It was poured in-situ between wooden shuttering on a brick base. The floors were of wooden joists, and the roof was traditional timber frame covered in tiles.

If you enjoyed this post, you may be pleased to learn that I stumbled upon an inter-war version of it nearby at the Riversdale Housing Demonstration Scheme in Roseburn.

If you have found this useful, informative or amusing, perhaps you would like to help contribute towards the running costs of this site (including keeping it ad-free and my book-buying budget) by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.

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https://threadinburgh.scot/2022/12/23/the-thread-about-sighthill-neuk-and-what-makes-this-quiet-and-leafy-post-war-suburban-street-so-very-special-and-unique/

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The thread about AIROH, ARCON, Tarran and Uni-SECO; temporary, prefabricated post-war housing in Edinburgh

This thread is a bit of an A-to-Z of the different types of temporary, prefabricated, post-war housing built in Edinburgh immediately after WW2.

In 1944, the Government passed the Housing (Temporary Accommodation) Act, in anticipation of a post-war housing and house-building crisis. While the primary intention of the act was to replace the c. 450,000 homes lost due to aerial bombing, a secondary consideration was to pick up where there pre-war slum clearance projects had left off in trying to provide better mass-housing for people. 300,000 temporary homes were planned to be built in the first two years after the war, to rapidly increase housing supply while the construction of new, permanent housing (be it traditional or prefabricated) tried to catch up.

The Ministry of Works approved 4 (later more) standard designs of prefabricated, two-bedroom temporary bungalows which could be rapidly built and give a life span of 10-15 years. They made use of as little traditional housebuilding materials (brick, stone and timber) as possible and many made use of the skills and industrial capacity of wartime industries. All of the temporary houses were of almost identical dimensions of approximately 32.5ft x 21.5ft (9.75 x 6.5m), so were all had about a 60m2footprint and ceilings 7ft 6in high. This meant they could all be built on the same (standard) foundation panel, on the same sized plot, in the same densities. Estates were often built of a mix of types depending on what was available.

All the temporary houses came with standardised, prefabricated kitchen and bathrooms units to designs approved by the Ministry of Works, including the Prefabricated Plumbing Unit which combined the kitchen sinks, water tank and hot water cylinder and was connected to the back boiler of the living room heater. Manufacturers had no flexibility to alter these, and only a small amount of leeway on the size and positioning of the other rooms.

While central government provided the houses, local authorities were responsible for identifying, securing and planning the sites for the Temporary Housing schemes. They also had to do the groundworks for them; build the roads, sewers, and lay the electricity, gas (if used) and water supplies up to each house. Three standard foundation types were used to suit different ground conditions and the authority was responsible for surveying the site and specifying which should be used. They could also specify the colours of external paint to be used.

Four thousand temporary prefabs were built in Edinburgh post-war, the first arriving in June 1945. In that year the Corporation estimated it had 5,000 families on their waiting list for housing and had requested 7,500 of the houses from the government. There were delays, however and in July 1946 there had been little more progress than the first 100 houses. The three largest schemes accounted for over half of the provision and were at Moredun & Ferniehill, at West Pilton and Muirhouse and at “The Calders” in Sighthill. All were built on the fringes of the city, sometimes where there were few (or no) facilities for people and where public transport was poor. Innovations such as temporary schools and mobile shops were required. The Corporation’s libraries department deployed its first mobile “bookmobiles”.

Where they were largely used for slum clearance and so displaced people away from their communities and families, meaning they could be quite unpopular. On the other hand, when new the houses were good, clean and modern and came with generous gardens.

No temporary prefabs survive in Edinburgh (the ones you can still see were all built as permanent prefabs), all were demolished in a programme starting in 1964, after lifespans around twice what had been intended. Most were replaced by permanent council housing on the same sites, some of which in itself was prefabricated.

Four types of temporary houses were built in Edinburgh:

A is for AIROH

This name is an acronym of Air Industry Research Organisation for Housing, developed by the British aircraft industry as a way to find use for its skills and manufacturing facilities in the postwar environment, and to make use of a glut of scrap aluminium from surplus aircraft. One of the 4 aircraft companies involved in their production was the Blackburn Aircraft Company at Dumbarton. These were the most common temporary prefab in both Edinburgh and across the UK, with 1,792 and 54,000 built respectively. The walls were aluminium trays sprayed with bitumen and filled with aereated concrete and coated on the inside with plasterboard. The roofs were lightweight alumnium trusses with corrugated aluminium sheet covering.

These houses have been described as an “airplane in house form“; manufactured in sub-assemblies on an aircraft production line, combined into 4 sections (complete with roofs, floors, windows, doors and all standard interior fittings) that could be transported by road and quickly joined together on site by unskilled labour. This material has its advantages; it is light, strong, does not rust or readily corrode and – initially – was readily available from scrapped aircraft. It took 2 tonnes of aluminium to build an AIROH house frame. So a single large fighter aircraft like a Typhoon give you all the aluminium for a house. The problem for aluminium houses of all types was that the price of the material soon rebounded and they became very expensive to produce, much more so than other types, but they filled a gap and were not the worst of the temporary prefabs by any stretch.

Identification features are the corrugated roof, the three equally-sized windows (with 4 to the rear) and the curved canopy over the front door. Some of the first permanent prefab houses ordered for Edinburgh were of the Permanent Aluminium or Blackburn Mk.II design. Visually almost identical, it was to a generally more robust standard of insulation and weatherproofing and was designed to last 60 years instead of the AIROH‘s ten.

A is (also) for ARCON

The ARCON name was a portmanteau of Architectural Consultants, was founded as a collaborative research body between architects and builders. The. It was based on the steel-clad Portal House prototype by Tailor Woodrow . It has a similar tubular steel frame (designed by renowned Anglo-Danish engineer Ove Arup) but is covered with a double layer of corrugated asbestos sheeting, with a curving roof built out of the same material.

ARCON was the second most-produced temporary prefab after the AIROH, 39,000 were built across the UK with 757 built in Edinburgh. Many were prefabricated in St. Boswellsi n Roxburghshire, now the Scottish Borders.For recognition, these were the only temporary prefabs built in Edinburgh with a curving roof and corrugated cladding. They had the usual steel windows and doors, with two large windows on either side of the front door, which itself was next to two smaller windows for the WC and bathroom.

T is for Tarran

The Tarran was named for its builders, Tarran Industries Ltd. of Hull. It was built of pre-cast, externally pebble-dashed, concrete panels with a timber floor and a lightweight steel truss roof covered in corrugated asbestos sheets.

19,000 Tarrans were ordered by the government, with 636 built in Edinburgh. The best recognition features are the distinct vertical, pebbled panels, two large windows to the front and a squat, tapering chimney with a large metal cowled ventilator on top. Sometimes they had the front door recessed to the side, creating a distinctive notch in the building and a small, covered porch area.

U is for Uni-SECO

The name stood for Unit and Selection Engineering Co. Ltd. – the company that had been formed London to design and built them. The design was based off of that for temporary wartime military offices. These were built from pre-fabricated plywood-framed panels filled with wood waste and cement insulation, with a roof of similar construction covered in asbestos sheets and roofing felt. They were sent to sites as a flat-pack kit to be assembled and it was amongst the cheapest of the temporary prefabs; the AIROH was 43% more expensive in 1947.

29,000 Uni-SECO houses were ordered, with 815 built in Edinburgh. The best recognition feature is the roof pitch, which was was so shallow as to appear flat. They had a small, tapered chimney and two large windows to the front; the door was either offset to the left or central (Mark III model), in which case the living room window wrapped-around to the side.

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