C. Heartfield,
You are living in a fool's paradise, comrade. Being a European you just do not understand what sprawl is. Do you know there are many suburban towns in Florida that have no sidewalks at all? No one is meant to live there. They are only meant to park there.
In America, developers buy a parcel of farmland, put up a housing development, a trailer park and a mall, then repeat the process over and over again. Often they don't even build schools or fire stations or police stations. Do you know we have schools inside malls in this country? Sprawl makes horrid, temporary communities with no character, no history. Obviously you can't see the danger of that, living as you do in a city that's been a living, vital city for what, a thousand years?
If you think the biggest problem Britons have is too much countryside, you are just nuts. Nothing could be more obviously a question of class conflict than the high price of land. How could a British *SUBJECT* fail to see that? I have a well-heeled friend who is looking to buy a place in London. She described running into something totally foreign to her as an American: the 65-year lease, apparently very common in London. What more classist contract is there? It says nothing more than: "I will forego the extra profit of selling this place outright in order to perpetuate my family's class position in future."
Wake up, Heartfield. The English are city-dwellers. Cities are more expensive to develop because the owning class have a stranglehold on the access to the cities that people desire. The fight is for access to the life and history the British people have created in their cities, not for Britons to live in trailer parks.