When he was aged six, Sam Webb accompanied his father to the grounds of the Tate gallery in London, to see an exhibition of prototype factory-built homes that gleamed with promise for better postwar social housing. That show, in 1943, resonated with him: three years earlier, during the blitz, he had seen the windows of his family’s house and shop in East Finchley, north London, blown away. It was a place with an outside toilet and gas lights that he described as “Dickensian”.
“Stepping into an Arcon Mark V prefab was like stepping into a future I could only dream of,” he recalled. “Here was a house so beautifully designed, it had everything.”
