You may remember William Woollard on Tomorrow’s World in 1974 announcing how, by 2010, we would all drive cars pre-wired to arrive at their destinations, while we chatted on pre-programmed personal communicators just like the one Captain Kirk had. Then we would all go home to our prefabricated houses, to eat pre-cooked moon food.

Well, with four years to go, we’ve already got sat nav, mobile phones and Pop Tarts. But the prefab home? No chance. The vast majority of our houses are still built using techniques invented by the Assyrians and last refined by the Romans. We still glue slabs of baked earth together, then plaster them inside and out with more goo dug out of the ground. While standing in the rain. Preposterous, really.

A modern home needs to be a super-insulated, thermal machine, not a hut with a hole in the roof. It will be stuffed with all kinds of technology: heat pumps, photovoltaics, lighting and security systems, a wireless LAN, and the usual incomprehensible maze of plumbing and wiring — thousands of components from hundreds of suppliers. So why even think of slowly assembling such a complicated machine on site? It’s like trying to build a car in a field.

The last time anybody thought this was a stupid idea was after the second world war, when lots of the bombed-out homeless needed shelter quickly. Nearly 160,000 houses were prefabbed, mainly from asbestos-reinforced cement panels. Costing about £1,000 each and with no foundations, these have been denigrated for 60 years as “sub-standard”, even though many still provide modest, comfy, albeit slightly dull homes.

But the stigma of post-war prefabs still lingers about the housing market like a bad smell. British developers resist off-site fabrication, as it’s called; it accounted for only 1% of the 160,000 new homes built last year, yet it is the norm in other civilised countries.

Half the Finnish population, for example, live in a house built in a factory. Their homes are warm, solid and not at all dull. We British, however, remain addicted to bricks and mortar. We like our homes to be solid, like Yorkshire pudding or the M25.

I blame the story of the three little pigs. That and the Great Fire of London. The diarist Samuel Pepys recounts how some of the first building regulations were introduced in 1666 to counter the possibility of such a disaster recurring. New houses had to be brick. At a stroke, the great tradition of oak-framed buildings received a 17th-century stigma from which it has never recovered.

It has done the prefab market no favours at all, because timber frames were the earliest commercial versions. In medieval Appenzell, in what is now Switzerland, peasants used to deviously construct their own “houses” from free, local timber — then dismantle and sell them on quickly before building another one. So everybody’s house took 30 years to build but nobody got hanged — or even taxed — for the capital offence of making money, a tradition which persists in Switzerland but not in Gordon Brown’s economy.

Timber-frame buildings were pegged together, so that they could be dismantled in the framing yard, then erected on site. Then dismantled and moved again a century later. The home of the late gardener Christopher Lloyd, Great Dixter in Northiam, was a hybrid, created in 1910 by his father and the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens from several buildings, including a great hall brought from Benenden.

You can buy modern versions of these great medieval buildings. They use identical joints and braces, and go up in a barn-raising, hair-raising five days. Firms such as Border Oak and Carpenter Oak sell oak-frame houses with crucks and ties and stitched collars. They are tailored and come with a bespoke invoice of several hundred thousand pounds, just for the frame.

But you’re buying a beautiful interior structure that will remain on show and a one-off piece of wooden architecture that will almost certainly outlive its concrete block equivalent. Sadly, the medieval method needs much puzzling and tabard-scratching before it meets modern building regulations.

The bumbling vernacular styles of Merrie England are as nothing compared to the blinding rationalism of Germany and Japan, where not only cars and houses but pets and pop music are made in factories.

There, the timber house stops being a wonky, curved frame made with bits of tree; it becomes a grid-post-and-beam system made from engineered timber such as Gluelam and Parallam and oriented strand board: wood, but not as we know it. You can buy a Platz-Haus or a Huf-Haus for the price of just the frame of an oak building — starting from about £300,000 for 1,800sq ft — and know it won’t twist out of shape.

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