Deputy Mayor launches RCKa’s modular prototype home at City Hall

On Thursday 14 August, we were delighted that Deputy Mayor for Housing and Residential Development Mayor Tom Copley opened our demonstrator module outside City Hall.

One in 21 children in London are currently homeless, and the cost to London councils of placing families in temporary accommodation is around £4m each and every day. Much of this housing is sub-standard, and there are children growing up in hotel rooms and B&Bs, without space of their own to sleep and study, nor for the preparation of decent meals.

Over the last nine months we’ve been working with Wates and modular specialist Rollalong on developing a prototype home that could help alleviate this crisis. Constructed in Rollalong’s Dorset factory, the home – which is fully space standard compliant, and has a sixty-year design life – and can be installed in a couple of hours.

We first installed the demonstrator module outside the Building Centre in Store Street back in January, where it accompanied the New Homes in New Ways exhibition. It then moved to Romford Market, where it remained for sixth months before being relocated around the corner to a site on the Waterloo Estate, where we will shortly be creating 18 new family homes using this system.

On Tuesday 12 August, it moved again, from Havering to Newham, where we gave it a bit of a refresh, and will now sit outside City Hall for the next four weeks.

Launching the module, Tom Copley said “We all recognise we’ve got a housing crisis in London, and for people who are homeless and living in temporary accommodation, they are at the absolute sharpest end of this. One of the key solutions is building the homes that we need, and in particular, social rented homes. And we also need interim solutions as well, while we build the social rented homes that we desperately need. That’s why solutions like this are so vital.”

You can read more about this initiative here.