In the next part of a series looking back at the history of the built environment of Rickmansworth and its surrounding areas, Three Rivers Museum Trust chairman Fabian Hiscock reflects on the importance of post-war pre-fabricated housing.

So far in this series we’ve concentrated on the very important development of the local housing stock from the 1860s to the 1920s. But there were several important later influences on the way our area looks now, and many of them were a consequence of war.

The development of Metro-Land had already started in the 1880s, and in the Rickmansworth and Chorleywood areas really began to be seen after about 1920, partly on the back of the ‘Homes fit for Heroes’ concept but actually a thoroughly commercial initiative - the Cedars estate is probably the best known of them.

The Metropolitan Railway got to Croxley Green in 1925, and was quickly followed by Frankland Road, Valley Walk and the other roads on the hillside down to the canal. But they were, and remain, solid building aimed at the new ‘London Commuter’. ‘Council housing’ was an important part of the post-war investment, with Gonville Crescent an example, but these too were seen as permanent.

Meanwhile London, heavily bombed in World War Two, was already expanding and needed more space. The development of South Oxhey had already been conceived from 1933 and started in 1946, and a very carefully designed plan. But the crisis in housing ‘bombed out’ people had been recognised as early as 1941 and planned from 1942, with a deliberate investigation in 1943 into American pre-fabrication techniques – all against a wartime background of lack of both materials and money. The ‘Emergency Factory Made’ (EFM) housing project was announced in 1944 to start immediately at the close of the war.

And our area was at once important in that project. Councils had the authority to claim suitable sites, and Rickmansworth UDC took on the grounds of The Grove at the top of Baldwins Lane, Croxley Green. The Building Research Station (now BRE) in north Watford was responsible for vetting the 1400 designs offered by industry, while one of the first of an imported Swedish all-timber design (intended to be permanent rather than temporary) was erected at Abbots Langley in January 1946. The Rickmansworth-based builder Unity Structures provided nearly 14,000 pre-cast concrete and asbestos buildings on a steel frame - one is preserved at the Chiltern Open Air Museum. And at Croxley Green, what is now Grove Crescent had about 100 small flat-roofed bungalows, with others at the end of Fuller Way. These lasted until the late 1960s.

The Temporary Housing Programme didn’t really achieve what was planned because of rising costs and the availability of more permanent alternatives. But it did provide much needed emergency housing in the 1940s, and had a real if short-lived influence on the look of our area.