In early December Brighton Housing Trust (BHT) and property developer, QED, opened 36 shipping containers retrofitted with kitchens, bathrooms and insulated plaster-board walls.

The units have been erected on spare land in the city and will be used to house local homeless people, the number of which has been increasing steadily in recent years, according to BHT chief executive, Andy Winter.

“There’s a chronic shortage of affordable housing in Brighton,” Winter told CNN. “I was initially very skeptical about housing people in metal boxes … but the containers have been converted to an extremely high standard.”