Mr Prescott has betrayed his own tough rhetoric

The march of concrete over the remaining green places in the South-east seems inexorable

Here comes the first building boom for a generation. Not before time, many would say, as John Prescott announced yesterday that land will be released for the building of hundreds of thousands of homes in the South-east over the next 30 years. But while the homes are needed, the struggle to build them will run into emotive protests. Because, although many of these homes will be built on land that has been previously developed, many thousands will be built in some of the last green places of southern England.

At first sight, there is a tragic inevitability about this. Despite greenbelt regulations, houses are creeping all over wooded hills and grassy fields in the South-east. I remember visiting one such proposed development in Hockley Wood, in Essex, a few years ago, which was being opposed by a well-organised and well-publicised protest. This part of Hockley was, in the developers' eyes, just empty, muddy space, ripe for development. For the protesters, it was a precious place full of well-known trees and ponds and badger setts and brambles they wanted to save for themselves and their children.

I remember visiting the protesters' benders, and being shown around their proudest achievement – a tunnel complete with a door that locked on with steel cables, built by the self-styled "best tunnel builder in Britain", a young man called Ed. The protesters were full of optimism, believing that their emotion and their solidarity would win out over the hard-headed views of the developers.

Now, three years later, the protesters have gone, the tunnel has gone, the badgers have gone, and new residents have moved into their new homes: three-, four- and-five bedroom houses with large gardens and space to park a couple of cars. The houses go for up to half a million pounds. They are just what people in the South-east aspire to, a spacious home in a quiet location within driving distance of London, with a few birds still singing in a few remaining trees.

Although this march of concrete over these few remaining green places seems inexorable, there is a vision that promises to get us out of this need to pour concrete over all our woods and wild places. The buzzwords of this vision are "brownfield" and "density" – the plan is to build closely packed houses on land that wasn't too nice to start with. Visionaries such as Richard Rogers have long been pointing to the pleasures of high-density urban living, in Bloomsbury or downtown Amsterdam, where people live cheek by jowl but see their areas as desirable and fun to live in.

John Prescott has tried to incorporate some of this vision into his new programme. But will it be enough, and will it work? Although 60 per cent of the new development is slated to be on brownfield sites, that still means 40 per cent of an awful lot of houses slicing through green places. And although he has been talking tough on density for a long time, he seems to be shying away from tough action. For instance, last year Prescott was giving interviews in which he told journalists that he was "preparing a tough new planning regime" in which "builders will be ordered to incorporate high densities into future projects in the South".

At the moment, the average density in the South-east for new building is 22 dwellings per hectare. Richard Rogers, in Towards an Urban Renaissance, argued that 35-45 dwellings per hectare would work very well as a baseline. Other architects and planners have been suggesting that much, much higher densities can be desirable. But Prescott's new programme only reiterates an old promise to try to hold developers above 30 dwellings per hectare. "In future, applications to develop larger sites for new housing at below 30 dwellings per hectare will be liable to be called in and will have to be justified following public enquiry".

In other words, 30 dwellings per hectare is not an ambitious target. And yet even this may be hard to achieve. The truth is that people are yet to be convinced about high-density developments. While those protesters in Hockley Wood were camped out trying to stop the houses being built at all, the local residents associations were also trying to change the plans; but they only wanted to ensure that fewer houses got built.

The idea of dense, low-cost housing would not have appealed to these residents at all. They wanted ever bigger, ever more spacious houses, so that fewer people would come and live near them.

And you can see why. Already, the pressure on roads, railways, education and health care in the South-east is intense. Chuck a high- density development into a commuter area such as Hockley Wood and what do you get? More gridlock and more pollution as all the new residents pile in their cars to go shopping and get to work, bigger waiting lists at the hospitals, more crowded schools down the road. What what village, what town is going to sign up to that?

The problem is that no political rhetoric about increasing the density of new developments will come to anything positive unless the money is on the table; not just for the developments themselves, but also for all the complicated infrastructure that developments entail. It's easy to blame the developers for constantly putting up sprawling, suburban-style plans, but they cannot wave a wand and magic in the railways, the bus routes, the hospitals, schools and jobs that would make denser developments work everywhere.

Even in cities, without good planning and generous funding, high density can spell deep misery. As Richard Rogers has said over and over, there is a real difference between the high density of Nash terraces and the high density of slum terraces. It's easy for Kensington residents to say that high-density living can work, but much harder for the residents of run-down city estates to see its benefits.

While a consensus is being formed by those who are looking at the bigger picture that dense housing is the only way forward, individuals affected by its reality are not so sure. In some cities, battles are being fought on the ground against government-backed regeneration schemes that would aim to increase the density of housing.

For instance, one battle is going on in Kilburn, in north-west London, where residents were at first delighted when they heard that there was going to be a multi-million pound scheme to rebuild their estate. However, the scheme includes proposals to double almost the density of the area, by building an extra 2,400 flats, and now many residents are speaking out against the plans. They know only too well what high density means when it is married to low funding – dirt, noise, cramped rooms, broken lifts and views of yet more concrete. One spokesman for the residents, Tony Bird, said: "What's on offer at south Kilburn represents a high-density nightmare – an architects' fantasy, driven by underfunding."

There is nothing really inevitable about our desire to live only in detached houses with private roads and garages and fenced-off gardens. But it is fuelled by our honest response to the realities around us, and unless the Government is prepared to push a lot more public spending into a lot more public services, from planning to transport, then we will go on wanting to retreat into our cocoons. And so yet more of the last wild, muddy and brambly spaces in England will, no doubt, be sacrificed.

n.walter@btinternet.com