Rosemary Goring: I despair at the despoliation of our greenbelt

While only a fraction of these developments fall into the Government’s affordable housing scheme, the volume of construction promises to turn much of the region into a building site. With substantial schemes in the pipeline from Dunbar and North Berwick to Tranent and Prestonpans, the once-proud towns that lie east of Edinburgh will soon be little more than spaghetti suburbs, entangling with each other along the clogged roads into the capital.

Naturally, the articulate voices of protest in prosperous places such as Gullane or Dirleton sound to onlookers like a classic case of Nimbyism; locals upset at the prospect of incomers ruining their neighbourhood and reducing property values. Nor can one decry the need for more building. Our population has been rising incrementally in recent years, largely because of immigration. That it now stands at an all-time high means provision must be made for an expanding populace. Just as you can’t build a house without mortar, so you can’t expand housing stock without, it seems, treading on a few corns.

No doubt there is a bit of the Nimby in all of us, especially when the bulldozers start digging beyond our garden wall. But there is much more than selfishness behind the unease and anger such developments have roused. No one would argue that affordable housing is not urgently required to rectify decades of council house retrenchment and selling. Heedlessness about the demand for cheap housing began under the Tories but Labour also was oddly unconcerned that low-income householders were being forced onto the private rented market. Yet the solution to one problem should not be to create a multiplicity of others. As so often with high-minded official objectives, in the effort to meet government targets councils react with a lack of vision and thoughtfulness that smacks of panic and ignores the sensitivities both of environment and citizens.

Why are greenfield sites no longer sacrosanct? One of the glories of this country is its wild, wide spaces and the necklace of individual villages and towns that gives each region its personality. Eating away at the fields and trees that are part of everyone’s heritage is to short change all of us, not only today but for generations to come. Once submerged beneath brick, flowers and trees, earth and grass are irreparably gone. I envisage soon that once-small towns will have signs, as in Italy, directing visitors to the "historic centre" that will lie behind mile upon mile of faceless modern dwellings.

In a self-serving statement Derek Lawson, one of the strategic land directors of Cala Homes, which is building some of these estates, said: “The stated policy of East Lothian Council is that every community should take its share.” It sounds reasonable until you consider that 100 houses in one location will have a far less deleterious impact than 25 in another. A conservation village such as Dirleton could lose its character overnight if it is covered in concrete. It is vandalism to allow a unique and venerable location to be ruined in the name of a policy intended to improve the quality of people’s lives, be they private owners or social renters.

As with recent schemes on the eastern outskirts of Glasgow, whose lawns and washing lines lie but a few metres from motorway noise and fumes, the insidious urban creep along commuter corridors is despoiling the landscape. Nor is it doing much for residents’ health.

It’s doubly vexing because there are good – indeed better – alternatives. If councils are obliged to dance to the Government’s tune, like the little girl in the red shoes in Hans Christian Andersen’s grisly story, they should be given time and strategic advice to come up with imaginative, durable, life-enhancing ways of designing new homes. In the long term, we need a cultural shift away from the unsustainable belief that to own a home is to have your own garden path and double garage. Across parts of Europe and America, such an axiom would be met with incredulity. Before a more enlightened outlook can take root, however, it should be an unbreakable rule that greenbelt means greenbelt. Brownfield sites, in contrast, are a sensible solution for new housing. Better still is inner-city regeneration, building in areas already well served by infrastructure. Rejuvenating derelict buildings or replacing them with custom-built high-spec modern flats injects new life into old or rundown areas and improves the wellbeing of an existing urban centre. It also cuts down on commuting and pollution and the need to afford a car.

As designs for London’s proposed cityscape show, elegant or even arresting skyscrapers, built to accommodate families as well as singletons, are the most environmentally sound use of space. I’m not suggesting a Gherkin or Shard for the middle of Inverness or Dundee, though I wouldn’t rule it out. What is abundantly clear, however, is that when it comes to building for the future, our thoughts should be elevated – in other words we should think up rather than over. We should revamp rather than obliterate. We should replace rather than sprawl.

Despite a decade of austerity, to which even the most profligate of us have adapted, the housing trade is among the last to embrace the idea of upcycling or recycling, of mending and making do. If a government imposes a demanding edict upon its councils, the least it can do is help them achieve this without in the process reducing a region’s charm. That way they will keep council taxpayers as happy as those who will one day become their neighbours.