Behind the floral curtains of suburbia, radicals are plotting a revolution. In a late Victorian villa in Surbiton, Surrey — better known for Tom and Barbara in The Good Life than political extremists — the talk at a conference a week or so ago was of insurrection, class war and concreting over more of Britain’s green and pleasant land.

Experts from Kingston University’s Centre for Suburban Studies were dreaming of dotting the countryside with houses, creating sprawling megacities and ushering in an era of cheap homes for all.

“We will have a city 100 miles in diameter taking in Cambridge and Windsor and Brighton,” declared James Heartfield, author of Let’s Build!, a book launched at the conference that advocates ending the division between town and country and the building of 5m homes in the next decade.

Other speakers espoused the radicals’ manifesto: “Projected household production is grossly inadequate . . . we call on government to abolish the artificial distinction between town and country . . . only by master-planning southern England can we develop the green belt . . . providing high quality, affordable housing for all.”

It is the sound of a new suburban militancy, marching in the name of hardworking families squeezed into ever smaller and more expensive rabbit hutches. The radicals are calling for nothing less than the repeal of planning laws. Their aim, as they see it, is to break the state’s 60-year stranglehold on urban development.

Instead of building in designated urban areas, eating up school playing fields and gardens, they want Britain to spread out across meadow and vale with spacious new houses and rolling gardens. They even want to build housing estates in national parks. The result, they say, will be so good it will be called “Superbia”.

“Less than 10% of this country is built on, yet 89% of us live in densely packed towns and cities where the pressures and prices are becoming intolerable,” says Heartfield. “Who exactly is all that countryside being saved for?”

He is not alone. Right-leaning think tanks including the Adam Smith Institute and the Policy Exchange have criticised the planning system; the latter has likened the government’s power to deny anybody a new home set in suburban sprawl to a right “to dictate what clothes to wear . . . and what cars to drive”.

Nick Hubble, head of the Centre for Suburban Studies, has come to a similar conclusion that policy must be changed. “It is almost a Stalinist act to say you must live this way and not that way,” he says. “A combination of immigration and families wanting to move into more spacious surroundings will create such pressure that greenfield sites have to be developed. It would be better to plan that now.”

This is heresy in the eyes of urban design gods, such as the architect Lord Rogers, and environmental bodies like the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE). They fear that once suburban sprawl is unleashed there will be no stopping it. Cities will decline and countryside disappear. The right-wing sprawlers accuse such opponents of “hypocrisy”, “elitism” and “social engineering”.

To Robert Bruegmann, an American professor of urban planning and author of Sprawl: a Compact History, the rise of suburbia has been a war between the haves and have-nots. Aristocrats and other elites have always contained the masses and their houses, he claims.

“Ensconced in their great country estates, suburban villas and spacious London flats, the aristocrats and the intellectuals fulminated against the way ordinary citizens were obliterating age-old distinctions between city and country . . . levelling long-standing class distinctions,” he writes in a foreword to Heartfield’s book.

“The tradition of fulminating aristocrats and the literati has been carried on in contemporary Britain by individuals like the architect Lord Rogers of Riverside.