ABSTRACT
Surrounding the emergence of the Temporary Housing Programme has to be set a strange group of circumstances. The nation was still at war when the programme was first announced to the public in 1944. Although the tide of the war had turned by the battle of El Alamein in October-November 1942 and the Anglo-American landings in North Africa afterwards, in the midst of rationing and general shortages of food and fuel the exhibition of a type of house, new both in form and concept, just over a year after these victories, seems unlikely. Nor was the house the only ‘new’ phenomenon to appear during the war. The whole development of the mechanism of the welfare state was to emerge and be published during the war3 as a herald of the changes that were to come in a peacetime, which was then viewed as more or less certain if not actual.
