Above: Last visit to the first factory I ever worked at. Returning to collect items from the closing down auction.
The Silent Factories: How did the UK Offsite Revolution Stall?
Daniel Grundy’s path to offsite was far from predictable. Starting with a mechanical engineering degree, he ended up working with software and marine systems, shifting toward building services for his master’s.
He never imagined that a few years later he’d find his calling on the shop floor at Swan’s NuLiving factory as a process engineer. Across nearly a decade in volumetric manufacturing, he’s seen offsite deliver fantastic homes at speed—and watched as once-vaunted factories closed their doors for good.
Determined to understand how avoid to history repeating, he’s now a Doctoral Researcher at Loughborough University, researching what construction can learn from manufacturing history to build a better future.
In the mid-2010s, optimism gripped residential construction. Companies like Ilke and L&G opened massive factories. Signifying a bold promise: offsite construction would revolutionise building. The hallmarks of the offsite vision were; Speed, Cost and quality with reduced environmental impact.
Sadly, that optimism faded. A decade on, few from that era still operate. Ilke, L&G, Swan Housing, Urban Splash, TopHat, Lighthouse, and others, stand silent, doors closed. Nor is this isolated to that wave; established players like Caledonian and Thurston struggled or collapsed.
Having worked at, visited, and sadly, sometimes helped to dismantle many of these factories, I witnessed these struggles up close. This isn’t just my own story, working and speaking with former offsite employees, reveals a consistent picture: unfulfilled promises and persistent hurdles. While individual closure triggers may differ, common fundamental themes repeat across the sector.
Fixation on automation: Heavy upfront capital expenditure created rigid factory setups that couldn’t adapt when project specs or market demands shifted.
KPI disconnects: Pushing metrics like “work started” prioritised keeping the factory busy over a whole system throughput, resulting in costly inventories of work-in-progress and limited customer handovers.
Buzzwords over process: Terminology like “Lean” and “DfMA” was widely used, but not necessarily fully understood/deployed and the practical workflows needed to link design, factory, and site were missing.
Accumulating “process debt”: Much like technical debt in software, rushing into projects and not stopping to resolve issues led to operational shortcuts. Firefighting and unaddressed process debt eventually caught up, driving delays and rework.
I actually started my journey sceptical of the early promises. But over the years I’ve seen what can be achieved if done right. Alongside fantastic colleagues, I’ve helped deliver one factory’s first 2.5 module per day flow and another’s capability for 90-modules in six weeks on a sub-£500,000 capital budget. These glimmers of hopekeep me convinced of offsite’s potential to deliver speed, quality, and cost.
Yet after a turbulent decade, potential customers are rightfully apprehensive. We need to calculated approach, akin to Toyota’s “The Tortoise and the Hare” approach, to rebuild market confidence and demonstrate expertise. Offsite suppliers can’t simply rush to set up a mega-factory and start pushing modules out the door. Instead, they must clearly understand what’s required to achieve final handover. Companies must take a whole-system approach from design and manufacture through to installation, sign-off and hand over. Warranty, fire sign-off, and building control requirements shouldn’t be a surprise; For housing associations and developers, this whole-system mindset is precisely what to look for first and foremost.
This whole-system view drives my research. Without formal manufacturing training, my master’s dissertation provided the opportunity to dig under the hood. Why did manufacturing evolve the methods and tools it did? What of these are relevant? How should we use them? From this I saw some of the how and why, throughexploring the drivers of the Industrial Revolutions:
Industrial Revolution 1.0 – Craft production, Bespoke manual work supported by early machining.
Industrial Revolution 2.0 – Mass production and economies of scale.
Industrial Revolution 3.0 – Flow production, minimising inventory and waste, while driving quality (Lean, Six sigma, Theory of Constraints)