The Featherweights

Rt. Hon. Sir Stafford Cripps, British Minister of Aircraft Production, last week announced an order for 50,000 temporary, relatively cheap aluminum houses to shelter some of Great Britain's bombed-out millions. The construction of these new type houses will keep Britain's light alloys industries, its war expanded plane factories and its skilled army of aluminum workers busily occupied.

The lightweight houses will be prefabricated on assembly lines by plane builders already feeling the pinch of the transition to peace (Bristol Aeroplane Co., Vickers-Armstrong Ltd., Blackburn Aircraft Co.). More important, they will draw off much of Great Britain's and Canada's huge aluminum and magnesium production which has been more than quadrupled during the war, and which might otherwise have had but a piddling peacetime market.

Squarish and single-storied, each house has four rooms, built-in cupboards, a fireplace, walls well insulated against heat, cold and sound, stronger roofs and floor supports than conventional houses. Much more luxurious than the house many a citizen of Great Britain lived in before the war, they are carefully designed to outlast the average ten-year life of the usual temporary house. Their cost: $3,800 apiece.

Being light, they are fabricated complete in four sections (7 1/2 ft. by 22 1/2 ft.), each of which can be transported on one of the special trailers used in wartime highway transportation. At the site, the house can be set up complete, except for the time required to make plumbing connections, in four hours.

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