How ‘Ugly’ Nissen Huts Became Home to 100,000 British Families After the War

In the winter of 1947, a woman named Dorothy Parsons woke at three in the morning to find ice forming on the inside of her bedroom wall. Not the outside. The inside. Her husband had fought at El Alamein. He had come home. And this is where his country had put him. This is the story that the victory celebrations left out. After the war ended, four million British homes had been damaged or destroyed. The government had a solution — hundreds of thousands of empty military huts, made of corrugated steel, designed for soldiers on the Western Front. They were supposed to house civilian families for a year, maybe two. Some families were still living in them in 1960. Tonight we tell the story of what life was actually like inside those huts. The measurements of the rooms. The single coal stove. The outdoor toilet fifty yards away in the middle of winter. The families who applied for council housing every year and waited nine years for an answer. And the extraordinary thing that happened when people who had nothing were forced to live side by side with nothing. Topics: Nissen hut post-war Britain, British housing crisis 1945, prefab homes postwar UK, Quonset hut WW2, Italian Chapel Orkney, British austerity 1940s 1950s, bomb damage Britain WW2, council housing waiting list postwar, demobilisation Britain 1945, Peter Nissen Canadian inventor Sources: Stevenson, John — British Society 1914–45 (1984) Kynaston, David — Austerity Britain 1945–51 (2007) Hennessy, Peter — Never Again: Britain 1945–1951 (1992) Bullock, Nicholas — Building the Post-War World (2002) Imperial War Museum Archive — iwm.org.uk Historic England Archive — historicengland.org.uk Disclaimer: All images, graphics and video footage used in this production are either created, licensed, or legally transformed under fair use. All materials have been transformed during production to meet the criteria of fair use under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976. #BritishHistory #WW2 #MilitaryHistory #PostWarBritain #BritishArmy