Take an architect with an obsession for cleaning up heaps of rusting shipping containers and the uneconomic value of recycling steel and, with a dose of entrepreneurial flair you can get homes, factories, schools and offices.

And we are not talking here about third-world communities either. Existing reused container developments in Britain include studio business premises at Trinity Buoy Wharf, school classrooms on a very restricted site at Tower Hamlets College and a sensitive riverside business park at Leaside.

Neither are we talking about small-time architects. This innovative form of recycling is from award-winning architect Nicholas Lacey, known for his prestigious Crown Reach building in Vauxhall, the Rotherhithe Tunnel Bridge and Heron Quays on Canary Wharf.

Teamed up with ContainerSpace Ltd., architects Nicholas Lacey and Partners and engineers Buro Happold are now venturing on perhaps their most interesting recycling project ever.

Next year the City of Rochester, Kent will be home to a development of two-bedroom apartments built from recycled containers. These flats three and four story high will have green roofs to enhance the ecological design and be clad with timber to disguise the origin of the building material and enable them to blend with their historic surroundings.

Not that disguise is a necessary requirement for the occupants at least. At the Leaside project in east London tenants have been very satisfied. Leaside Regeneration's development director Phil Smith said, "Tenants might at first think they're getting some kind of Portakabin, but when they see them they love them. These are funky, fun, unusual buildings. You certainly wouldn't know you were in a container."

ContainerSpace is an upcoming and interesting concept in pre-fabricated building. The system offers flexibility, speed of construction and value for money. By employing 100% recycled shipping containers it offers a sustainable alternative to conventional construction.

The containers are pre-fabricated off-site in factory conditions, eliminating many of the problems associated with traditional building methods. Here they are upgraded as necessary to provide the desired thermal and acoustic performance standards and to meet local building regulation requirements. Delivered to site, the containers can be erected, and services connected, in a matter of days.

Don’t think either that container homes are pokey boxes. The new properties in Rochester will have a single bedroom, a double bedroom built from two containers side by side a kitchen which is almost a container on it’s own and an ‘L’ shaped lounge of three containers wide at it’s widest.

The flats have an estimated rental value of about £100 a week which means they are ideal for the low-cost housing the South East of Britain needs so desperately.

Look at any large container shipping port and you will find great piles of rusting containers, discarded because of stringent quality and safety regulations, these expensive rust hulks deserve a better second life.

But they cannot be recycled economically and so the graveyards continually expand, awaiting who-knows-what change in the price of steel waste that may or may not befall the industry.

But to Nicholas Lacey, near-perfect ones are easily worth the near £1000 each to buy and ship to his factory where they will be re-engineered into modules of very desirable offices, studios and homes.

While strong as a container, the new function requires sides and ends to be cut away, holes for windows and doors etc. and this weakens it, so Lacey designs and has fitted structural supports, pillars, gussets and lintels to replace the solidity of the box shape.

In the end, Lacey has recycled 100% of the containers, which is no mean feat and definitely a plus for the environment, offering a real green alternative to conventional construction methods and provides accommodation at a cost of less than half that of traditional building methods.

Yes, the finished buildings look a little odd and definitely need painting to stop them rusting away, but parts of every home need a lick of paint, says Lacey.

Nearly all of the work to turn the containers into human space is done in the partnership’s factory with a small team of engineers. Even after cutting, welding, strengthening and repainting, the containers are still not useable as offices or homes. They need thermal insulation, sound-proofing, wiring, plumbing, doors, windows, sanitary fittings, kitchens etc. All these are fitted at the factory so that very little on-site work is required.

Delivery to the site is probably the trickiest part of the exercise requiring almost military style planning especially if the location is in a busy city area with narrow streets and tall buildings.

Once there the units are craned into place and bolted together. Welding is possible too, but this makes the buildings, which despite the recycling angle are still often considered as temporary, more difficult to move later. Welding increases the on-site time too as more cleaning and painting is required afterwards. On-site time can be as little as a day.