The former poet laureate, Sir Andrew Motion, is citing Philip Larkin and Wordsworth in attacking the government’s road and house building plans, which he says pose the biggest threat to the English countryside in 60 years.  

In a speech to be delivered today, Motion, who is president of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, will tell the CPRE's annual general meeting: “Our countryside is in greater danger than it has even been in my lifetime – or yours. For the first time, I really believe the warning Philip Larkin gave us in his poem 'Going, going' will come true. The warning that a great wash of concrete and tyres will smother our green places, so 'that will be England gone'.”

A government minister has said the need for new housing could mean building on “environmentally uninteresting" fields and in designated green belt areas.

Motion will argue that green spaces are a fundamental human need: "Inside us all, wherever we live, is an absolutely primal atavistic need for green places and open spaces," and add: "Lives cannot suddenly be made whole, if they never knew, [quoting Wordsworth], 'a sense of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean, and the living air, and the blue sky'."