Now I want one of these. Technically a trailer and designed by Tim Pyne, the project originator. Size is 1000 sqft and comes fully fitted out and ready to move in. M-House can be specified to meet all UK building regulations. M-House comes in two pieces and delivery is 12-weeks after order. This is cool though £147,800 won't keep the heat off your pocket but there again you don't have to buy it! I believe one of these is on show in a field near Canterbury.
Visit http://www.m-house.org

Not much about roof top new-build

Not much yet about roof-top new-build you might say? Hang on and give me time, I have got plenty including this building in New York, started life as a 5-storey block and had another 5-storeys put on top. Big business is the air rights market over there! http://www.flickr.com/photos/stamen/4282661

It's not often I read New Scientist Magazine. However, browsing the newsagents at Victoria Station (London) today this caught my gaze. In a nutshell it explores what I confidently can call fact, that whether the green lobby likes it or not we aren't all suddenly going to make a rush to live back in the countryside from where around 90% of our ancestors came prior to the industiral revolution. World wide populations continue to move to cities and this the article recognizes is likely to be little more than disastarous ecologically. Whereas American cities were developed with the car in mind this is no longer recognized as the best approach by many planners, politicians, environmentalists et al. Rather to design cities which discourage car use, improve transport, offer mixed use development, i.e. workspace and residential side by side, good telecomunications and even grow food. The photo here kind of sums up the approach. The article continues then to talk about a new suburb of Shanghai being developed out of a muddy island which will be called Dontang and the article explores a risk analysis of what might go wrong as well as what the planners wish to achieve. Basically Dontang will be a short distance from downtown Shanghai and it is hoped the place will not just become another urbanized suburb full of cars. For this reason the whole area is being designed to make driving a trial. Wind turbines and green space will be a common feature in the new suburb but the article criticizes the inclusion of a golf course which could be set aside for more productive uses such as food production. The main thing is the Chineese are trying on a scale no one else seems to be. Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London, has visited for inspiration to take ideas forward in London. Read it yourself, New Scientist, £2.70 from newsagents.

Busy

I've been super busy these last 7-days. I was never that great at keeping diaries too! We've had two new clients join us this week both seeking land for self-build. One wants to build in the New Forest area and the other in southern Essex. If anyone has any land for sale or knows of any available we'd like to know.

A great day out yesterday was had at the Grand Designs Exhibition at the London Excel Centre. Of most interest to myself was the Grand Village. On display fully constructed was the Pad. Also on show the Micro Compact Home and the Huf Haus. My company is responsible for saucing land for clients of Padlife. Finding land to develop is no easy task and as the Pad becomes more well known finding land for it is likely to be difficult too against the conservative views of those who prefer houses made of baked mud. (See my last post). I had an interesting chat with Billie Lee, Director of the Micro Compact Home after half a dozen of us had clambered into one of his modules. He must have been making his 15 minute presentations all day as by the time I got to talk to him he was on the edge of suffering from cabin fever! However, the MCH is in demand and has been employed as accomodation on universcity campuses and into people's back gardens as extra living accomodation. An excellent marketing ploy of theirs has been to photograph their unit next to a Micro Car. Minalimalist living at it's best! With regards to the Pad the Times have been running their competition to win one worth £100K. Their winner was announced at 15:30 hrs though I don't have a name or know whether it has been announced in their paper today. However their link to Grand Designs follows below. One thing about the Pad. Last year our local council, Thanet District, suggested developing a green wedge not zoned for development, by our hospital for nursing accomodation. Doubtless they were thinking along the usual lines of the non-descript chalet style accomodation that would then fall into disuse when staffing was again cut. I wrote to the head of the council suggesting they try the Pad. What better than to be able to add accomodation and then remove it as needs arose and have less impact on the actual land since only a cental concrete block would be needed and not a mass of foundations under every part of the building. Sadly I never heard back from the council.

That aside and back to the exhibition. I also had a look at the Huf Haus...so did my wife and I fear she now wants to knockdown and replace our house. Should be interesting as we're an end of terrace!

http://property.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,14049-2206460.html

http://www.padlife.co.uk

http://www.microcompacthome.com

http://www.huf-haus.com

First of many.

Hello and welcome to my new blog. My name is Dave Chamberlain. I run a business based in Westgate on Sea in East Kent, more specifically in Thanet. I live here with my wife Paula, and daughters Aimee & Chloe and cats Daisy & Poppy. I was bought up in Broadstairs, attended Charles Dickens Secondary Modern and then moved onto Thanet Technical College where I studied Law, Politics and a few others. Thereafter I went into the construction industry for five years and produced Timber Frame Houses in a factory setting. These were sent out to sites on the back of a lorry and erected on site in days. A very efficient system and one that provides good insulation. From there I moved into the civil service with HM Customs & Excise and left after 14-years, quite long enough for any sane person. An unusual career path bearing in mind my interests and previous occupation but needs must at the time in an area that had high unemployment as bad as Consett in the North of England. The work was interesting and I saw a side of life not seen by many. I served out most my service in London Airports. During this time I lived in Ramsgate, then to Morden in 1991 (my wife came from that area), then Dorking, onto Horsham and back to Thanet in 2005. I now run UK Land Solutions (aka Plotwant) and have done for several years. This area has a huge potential which will eventually be fully realized and which in recent years has been lifted out of a depression with the aid of EU money. There is a long way to go with some aspects but a great deal has been done over the last few years. Local towns around here conurbate each other, Margate, Broadstairs and Ramsgate and further inland villages such as Monkton, St. Nicholas at Wade, Minster and Manston add some rural charm. The area has 22 sandy bays/beaches (so I'm told, I haven't counted them all). Thanet was once an island. There are a lot of events to visit during the summer and it's a great place to bring up children. If nothing else the beaches are at least free! Run Thanet into a search engine for further information.

What is this Blog about? The blog is here to explore modular and prefabricated building design and to act as a forum for others interested in the topic. My business, UK Land Solutions, (Previously known as Plotwant) sources land and commercial space for (re)development. I am very interested in the prefabricated housing systems market and modular design and construction too. I am also interested in Airspace or rooftop real estate, basically building on top of other buildings, penthouses and the like. We are retained by Padlife http://www.padlife.co.uk to source land for their clients. The older generation think of prefabs as huts made of asbestos panels put up to house families during the war who were bombed out of their homes. Many survived for years after and examples can still be seen. Their life expectancy wasn't designed to last more than a decade. Today's prefabricated designs are fuel efficient and made out of composite materials designed to deal with wear and tear and heat loss. The designs are radical compared to the average 3 bed semi or terrace. In the Sunday Times supplement this weekend Kevin McCloud states we are still using techniques devised by the Assyrians and last refined by the Romans. We dig mud from the ground, bake it into slabs, glue the slabs together with more mud, add more mud and goo to the out and insides to smooth it off and stick a hole in the roof to let heat and smoke out. He goes on to add you would not buy a well engineered car which had been built in a field so why likewise a house? In Finland half the population live in a house which was built in a factory, in the UK last year of the 160,000 new homes built only 1% were factory built.

Prefab has arrived. Punk changed the music industry for ever in the mid-70s. Now in the 21-hundreds prefab has taken the first steps to doing the same with the housing industry.