The deputy prime minister has set out a planning framework that permits the development of giant sheds to handle rising imports and the growth in demand for internet goods, which will be stored in warehouses clustered close to motorways and rail depots.

In the 1980s and 1990s the trend was towards large shopping centres on greenfield sites on the outskirts of towns. Now thousands of acres of countryside are set to be swallowed up by vast warehouse complexes serving whole regions.

Gerald Kells, the regional policy officer in the West Midlands for the Campaign to Protect Rural England, said that areas such as the Midlands, whose central location makes them particularly popular for such developments, were being devastated.

“Some of these buildings are huge. Large-scale warehousing has a huge impact on the countryside, damaging its tranquillity, adding to congestion problems and increasing emissions of climate changing carbon dioxide,” he said.

This weekend it emerged that the West Midlands regional assembly is considering plans for up to five “regional logistics sites” where several huge warehouses would be located side-by-side along major roads.

Under the plans, each site would cover 123-200 acres and would operate round the clock, generating 1,500 lorry journeys a day.

A report to the assembly suggests that the potential of such sites could be maximised by building warehouses six storeys high, each with up to 1m square feet of floor space — equivalent to 14 football pitches.

Each development would require an even larger outdoor area for storing containers, marshalling lorries and other facilities.

While Prescott has been heavily criticised for his housing policies, the rapid development of warehousing and other freight infrastructure has so far received little publicity. A hint of the government’s thinking has emerged in a draft of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister’s next policy planning guidance note on transport.

It suggests that local authorities should think twice before imposing restrictions on new warehouses, such as banning night-time lorry movements to give residents some peace, because of the effect on the “wider economy”.

Figures from Prescott’s department show that since 1999 in England and Wales, the floorspace covered by warehouses has risen from 1.4 billion sq ft to 1.7 billion sq ft.

By contrast, factory floorspace has stayed constant at 2.4 billion sq ft.

Malory Davies, editor of Logistics Manager and an expert on mass distribution systems, said: “Britain is losing its industrial base and importing more goods from abroad.

“That means we need fewer factories but more warehouse space to store our imports. Big sheds are appearing everywhere, but the Midlands is the most popular as it is so central and you can get to most of Britain within a day. The M1 is becoming lined with big sheds.”

Internet shopping is another cause. Amazon, the American-owned online book store, has one of Britain’s biggest warehouses near Bedford.

Retailers also see a chance to cut costs. Instead of sending goods to a dozen different points, they can use one vast shed and use lorries to distribute them.

The change is epitomised by Dixons, the electrical retailer, which plans to cut its 17 distribution centres to two over the next few years.

Perhaps the most intense development has been around land in the West Midlands known as the “golden triangle” to the companies which are fighting for space there.

The area lies between the M1, M69 and M6 motorways just south of Leicester. The A5 dual carriageway also runs through it, giving it some of the best transport links in Britain.

American companies have been moving into such sites. Gazeley, owned by Wal-Mart/Asda is building one of Britain’s largest warehouse complexes at Magna Park, a 500- acre site in the middle of the triangle. It will have 7.7m sq ft of floor space. The company has another eight sites under development around the country.

ProLogis, another American-owned company, has 50m sq ft of warehousing and plans another 12 developments totalling 4.5m sq ft in the next 12 months alone, including one at Kettering in Northamptonshire.

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