What is special about prefab design is its knack of stretching minimalism to new heights. There is no space for clutter in a prefab. As a model for uncluttered living prefab life takes some beating.
By not having any stairs minimalism is stretched to new heights. The shock of missing a step as you walk downstairs (which happens once every 2,222 times) is unknown inside prefabs.
(Alan Watkins of the Bath &Wilting once remarked that interviewing the MP for Taunton was
like "walking downstairs and somehow missing the last step. You were uninjured but remained disconcerted".)
"Man falls to death down his prefab stairs!" could only be a headline in Mad magazine. In one of the magazine's "let's look on the bright side of bad news!" issues there was a 'true life' report of how a clock on a motor car dashboard started working again for the first time in twenty-five years! This was after the car had crashed into a lamp post, killing the driver, mowing down three pedestrians, and decapitating a stray dog.
Being stairless does not mean that prefabs have no design glitches. The two steps leading down from the kitchen into the back yard are dangerously steep. Like the psychopath who lives next door they are a disaster waiting to happen. It is not always the case that prefabs have a mellowing effect on frayed nerves - as Adrian Denton (resident of prefab number thirty-six) will tell you. Once he was viciously punched from one end of his front garden to the other - and then hit with a leather belt. This incident took place just a few feet from the window where his old man - a stony-faced bus conductor known as Hawkface - sits watching his neighbours' every move. So why on earth did the coiled-attack machine known as Hawkface not intervene when his own son was being so grievously assaulted in front of his very eyes? Sherlock Holmes would have solved this mystery in a moment. It was Hawkface who was doing the assaulting.
Hawkface only takes on those who are smaller than him. However Hawkface is much smaller than Miss ('Pat' to her friends) Wafer Thin and he would never dare to take her on. Miss Wafer Thin is teacher-in-charge in the small school which is squeezed between the My Full Moon public house and the Saint Michael Is No Angel Church. thee seems little doubt that Miss Wafer Thin was placed on this earth in order to make a philosophical point. Namely that essence (how things really are) is not the same as appearance (how things seem). If one of her pupils was to step out of line Miss Wafer Thin's knobbly elbows and puny fists would be instantly transformed into wild-manic-flailing-windmill-style-beating-machines. So when she overheard the kid from the Blackway Estate who wanted to be a jockey make a derogatory remark about his new step-parents Miss Wafer Thin sprung into action. He was taken on a ten circuit canter around the classroom and made to jump over (oops! that should be 'into') the imaginary fences Miss Wafer Thin's mind's eye had painted up on the classroom walls. (Inspect these same walls even today and you will see the wall indents made by the 'irrational exhuberance' of that carefree 1950s' school day.)
Her work-out exercise completed, and with a healthy red glow now in her cheeks, Miss Wafer Thin would gently calm her shell-shocked pupils down and tell them how good the Germans were at making toys.

Charles Dickens (1812-1870): "In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice."