Wooden houses and firebreak, Austin Village
Introduction
The photograph on this page of Wooden houses and firebreak, Austin Village by A J Paxton as part of the Geograph project.
The Geograph project started in 2005 with the aim of publishing, organising and preserving representative images for every square kilometre of Great Britain, Ireland and the Isle of Man.
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Wooden houses and firebreak, Austin Village
Image: © A J Paxton Taken: 16 Sep 2023
In 1917, the Austin Motor Company imported two hundred prefabricated wooden houses from the Aladdin Company of Bay City, Michigan, on the shores of Lake Huron. These typical wooden houses from the American Midwest housed war workers, mainly women, at Herbert Austin's Longbridge factory in the countryside outside Birmingham. Firebreaks were incorporated between the wooden houses on the estate. In the 1920s, more conventional brick-built English suburban houses were built on these firebreak sites. In this photo, two of the Aladdin wooden bungalows can be seen to the left, with a pair of brick-built semi-detached houses to the right. Despite the precautions, only one wooden house has been lost to fire, according to the Austin Village Stories site; it is said to have been one used as a store by the workers who erected the houses https://www.theaustinvillage.com/a-history-of-austin-village .
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Image Location
Latitude
52.399831
Longitude
-1.973633