One of Britain’s biggest housebuilders, a specialist in the luxury London market, has started to make and sell houses built almost entirely in a factory.
Berkeley Group has cast aside years of suspicion by the traditional construction industry to embark on a huge drive to market modular homes.
Sixteen of its factory-built pre-fabricated houses will be launched at a site in Kidbrooke Village, Greenwich, southeast London.
Each of the houses’ rooms has been put together in the Midlands in steel-clad box frames, before being delivered by lorry to be stacked together on site, shaving 19 weeks off the traditional method of building.
Moreover, the assembly line is just getting started. Berkeley said that it had another 50 modular homes in the pipeline and that it aimed to open its own dedicated factory in the near future. Though the cost of manufactured homes was comparable with traditional methods, it said, this would become cheaper as output accelerated.
The FTSE 250 group’s first factory-built, three-floor homes will sit alongside identical-looking houses constructed by the traditional, on-site method at its site in Greenwich.
“They look exactly like a traditional home,” Karl Whiteman, Berkeley’s executive director who is managing its modular division, said. “The customer will not be able to tell the difference. Our ambition is that the finished quality will be as good as traditionally built homes that have been built on site.”
Factory-built homes have moved on from the cheap, squat prefabs that Winston Churchill ordered in the 1940s to fix the scarcity of housing after the Second World War. Modular homes are now often of a higher quality, are more ecological and even more luxurious than many of those built in the traditional way, from popular Cape and ranch styles in the United States to the modernist Huf Haus from Germany.
While traditional builders rely on an itinerant workforce, toiling in conditions affected by the weather, in a factory workers can deliver homes in a safe, dry, indoor environment with high-precision equipment that allows for fewer defects.
“This is a huge opportunity to improve the quality of new homes, Mr Whiteman said. “I liken it to the evolution of car manufacture: at one time all cars were being hand-built, but now cars are designed for the customer, then designed for manufacture and then assembled in a factory.”
Berkeley is not alone in seeing the appeal of an updated, upgraded prefab. The advantages of modular building have begun to attract interest even outside the building industry. Legal & General, the FTSE 100 insurer, is building the biggest modular factory in the world, in Sherburn-in-Elmet, North Yorkshire It hopes that the factory will produce 3,000 homes a year, with the first going into a development in Crowthorne, Berkshire. China National Building Material Company, meanwhile, is building six modular housing factories in Britain in a £2.5 billion deal with the housing association Your Housing. Nevertheless, the move by Berkeley is significant, as most of the early interest in L&G’s factory-built homes has been from housing associations or build-to-rent developers. Until now, the country’s biggest housebuilders have stopped short of making entire homes off-site.
Factory construction is not cheaper initially and requires a large upfront cost, while assembly lines are difficult to switch off in a downturn, especially with the traditional option of simply downing tools. However, housebuilders are under government pressure to increase their annual output of new homes at a time when the industry is facing a severe shortage of skilled workers, such as bricklayers and plumbers.
Indeed, Mr Whiteman said that the skills shortage was one of the biggest reasons behind Berkeley’s move into modular housing. “One of the key drivers for us has been the pressures on the industry in terms of the supply chain, particularly around labour,” he said. “For the last couple of decades, the industry hasn’t been training as it should have done and it is now at the point where it has to modernise if we are going to deliver the number of homes that are needed. We have not been training, as a country, sufficient enough skilled labour, so we have got to find another capacity for the industry.”
Constructing the way ahead
The future
Modernise or die: that was the conclusion that Mark Farmer came to last October after being asked by the government to lead a review into the construction industry. The sector veteran and chief executive of the property consultancy Cast said that radical steps were needed to address problems in the sector, such as the skills shortage.
He concluded that factory-built housing was a key way to address this issue for housebuilders while raising the number of homes built each year. Many have taken note.
- Legal & General is building the world’s largest prefabricated modular housing factory, in North Yorkshire. It hopes to build 3,000 homes a year.
- China National Building Material Company is to build six factories in Britain in a £2.5 billion venture with the northern-based housing association Your Housing Group and WELink, a renewable energy company.
- Pocket Living, a starter-home developer in London, takes pods built from concrete and steel in a Bedford factory. It transports them to London to be bolted together.
- Urban Splash has completed a development of 43 modular townhouses in New Islington, central Manchester.
The long run of a quick fix
The past
The prefab homes introduced at the end of the war were a quick-fix attempt to combat the chronic housing shortage caused by the Blitz (Tom Knowles writes).
More than 155,000 were mass produced in sections before being assembled in haste on sites across the country between 1944 and 1949. It cost the government £207 million to build them. Most were constructed by the aircraft industry, using aluminium from decommissioned war planes.
They were designed to last for ten years, allowing enough time for a postwar Britain to build new council blocks, yet many established a certain hold over families, who enjoyed for the first time luxuries including hot water, a toilet and bathroom, fridges, built-in storage and electric lighting.
The estates created a sense of community that became so popular that residents campaigned to save them from demolition. Seventy years later, some are still being lived in, with a few dozen being given a grade II listing by English Heritage as a “perfect evocation of the postwar decade”.
Lewisham council faced a fierce, although ultimately successful, battle to replace 186 prefab bungalows at Excalibur Estate in Catford, southeast London, with 371 new houses and flats. Excalibur was the largest postwar prefab estate left in Britain, built by German and Italian prisoners of war, but only six were listed to be saved from demolition.
Original Link - The Times
