Mapleton Crescent: the London high-rise factory-built in Bedfordshire

Wandsworth, London
This stylish new 27-storey residential tower is an exemplar of innovative modular housing, each flat built and fitted out off-site, then craned into place at the rate of one storey a dayIt’s a beautiful chimera, now more than a century old, that a house might be built in the same way as a car. It has long seemed so practical, so sensible and at the same time inspiringly progressive that the benefits that Henry Ford discovered in the production line – speed, efficie