Even as I watch, over the course of a few hours, internal walls are erected and the ochre external brick walls rise a few feet higher. Building started seven months ago, but the first residents will be unpacking their knick-knacks by July.

Although common on the Continent, these homes – mostly prefabricated off-site and craned into place – are rare in this country. Just a handful of the 110,000 homes built last year were constructed this way – but they could offer a solution to the pressing housing affordability crisis in the South East. They could also provide an answer to the sluggish progress of new home building in this country, which every year lags far behind demand, contributing to homelessness, overcrowding and soaring rents and house prices.

Looking nothing like the 153,000 bungalows hastily thrown up to replace houses destroyed by the Luftwaffe during the Second World War, these 21st-century models are highly energy efficient, with owners typically paying £300 a year on heating for a four-bedroom, three-storey home thanks to their triple-glazed windows and “passivhaus” levels of insulation.

Their most attractive feature must be their cost, which is on a par with the cost of building conventional houses despite their energy efficient qualities. All 51 of these homes, the first of their kind in the UK, will be affordable housing, but they could also be a new direction in private house building.

“These houses are an opportunity to get the homes we need now, fast,” says London Assembly Member Nicky Gavron, spokesman for Labour on housing and planning. “These are not the boxy prefabs of the past, these are the homes of the future.”

This month, economists at the International Monetary Fund and property valuers at the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors have warned of a ballooning house price bubble in London and the South East, making the prospect of living in or within commuting distance of the capital increasingly rare for ordinary families.

For young people trying to get onto the housing ladder, home ownership in London and the South East now entails taking on alarming levels of debt. When I first bought my own home, a nondescript late Victorian terrace in south London 20 years ago, it cost me three times my fairly modest salary. That same house would now cost me 28 times that.

The homes, built by Climate Energy Homes for developers Circle Housing, represent a sea-change in the way new houses are built in this country. Christine Hynes came up with the idea a few years ago in her kitchen, while she was wondering why it was so hard to find a house she actually wanted to live in. “I had no construction experience, but I went to Sweden to see how they build houses there and came back convinced we could do something like that in the UK.”

Several years – and several crises – later: “We sank all our money into the idea and at one point got down to our last 50p”, her dream of elegant, energy-efficient, rapid-build, healthy and waste-free homes is coming to fruition.

“They take pressure off the grid because they require less heating, they are good for the economy because occupants have more money in their pockets and because they are made with all natural materials, the indoor air quality is also very good. For older people, for whom fuel poverty is such a serious problem, they take away the 'heat or eat’ dilemma,” she says.

“Their look is important too – with nods to the flat-fronted Georgian terraces of central London – they are also quite industrial in character, which makes sense as they are on the site of an old carpet warehouse. We’ve shown that 'passivhaus’ doesn’t have to mean looking like something that has fallen off a spaceship.”

A further 200 are to be built at Enfield, north London, with others in the pipeline.

> via telegraph.co.uk