They don’t come more quintessentially English than Dunsfold. The Surrey village – a few miles south of Cranleigh, close to the West Sussex border, and home to just 1,000 people – boasts the kind of scene-stealing features that wouldn’t look out of place in an episode of Miss Marple: the village green with its obligatory war memorial; a 13th-century church withwell-tended graves; clusters of discreetly expensive houses, many listed and set in their own woodland.

Until recently, the only disturbance might have been late-night drinkers spilling out of the ancient Sun Inn, or a distant hum from nearby Dunsfold Aerodrome, built by the Canadian army during the second world war but now used by Jeremy Clarkson and his fellow Top Gear presenters as a test track for cars – it also doubled as Miami airport for stunt sequences in the 2006 James Bond film Casino Royale.

There is trouble in paradise, however. Parishioners of Dunsfold, and neighbouring villages, have taken to the streets in protest, complete with banners and a battle cry – amid distinctly ungenteel rumours of inter-group backbiting, blackmail and intimidation.

The reason for their anger is the proposed Dunsfold Park new town, an “eco-development” of 2,601 homes, set in 350 acres of lakes and parkland, with a primary school, healthcare services, shops and a large business district. It would be sited on the airfield, which, besides its screen appearances, also houses an industrial park and is the venue for an annual air show.

Last month, about 100 supporters of the protest group Stop Dunsfold Park New Town (SDPNT) – thought to number in the thousands, and including such luminaries as the theatre director Trevor Nunn – turned up outside Waverley borough council’s offices in Godalming to have their say at the public inquiry into the new-town plans.

The group’s chairman, Professor Christopher Marks, a cancer surgeon and Dunsfold parish councillor, is keen to describe himself not as a Nimby, but a Lamby: Look After My (Your) Back Yard. “Of course we want people to have housing and we would support a practical development,” says Marks, who is in his mid-sixties. “But this part of the world can only cope with so many people. We just don’t have the infrastructureto support parachuting in 2,601 new homes.

“There is no local train station, and the A281 [the main road from which the site would be accessed] is already overcrowded. The new site would create a backlog of traffic each morning and night trailing into West Sussex. And what with satnav already leading lorries down our single-track lanes, there would be chaos.” The developer behind the scheme is the Rutland Group, which took over the 600-acre site, together with 1,000 surrounding acres, in 2002 in a joint venture with the Royal Bank of Scotland (the troubled bank has since pulled out). Jim McAllister, chairman of Rutland Group, dismisses its critics as “the worried wealthy”: ageing homeowners in Dunsfold and neighbouring Alfold, Chiddingfold, Cranleigh and Bramley, where it is virtually impossible to find a three-bed home for less than £500,000.

“We have spent seven years researching the background for this,” says McAllister, who claims 73% of people who have come to the new town’s public exhibitions have shown support. “We will be providing 900 affordable homes within the scheme, for young people who work in the area and want to live here, but can’t afford to.

“Waverley borough council is presently building only 70 affordable homes a year, which doesn’t meet the need for housing in the area: we need at least 500 . . . Besides, in an ageing community, by the time Dunsfold Park new town would be completed – probably in about 15 years’ time – most of those protesters would be dead, anyway.” Dudley Hewett, 24, a carpenter who lives in Farley Green, a 10-minute drive away, with his parents and two brothers, spoke up at the inquiry in favour of the development. “This kind of scheme is probably the only way I will ever get on the housing ladder in this area,” he says. “My brothers, my friends and I don’t want to rent all our lives.”

The Rutland Group is also keen to stress that the proposed new town’s environmental credentials, which include the introduction of low- or zero-carbon-emission public transport, both on site and between it and outlying towns, car clubs, 100% water harvesting and recycling, and maximum energy efficiency through building design.

However, the plan has already been rejected twice. Last April, it was denied status as an eco-town by the then housing minister, Caroline Flint – although supporters and opponents argue over the reason – and in September, the borough council decided the affordable homes would not necessarily help those in greatest need, as priority would be givento people on low incomes working on the site’s expanded business park.

The Rutland Group lodged its appeal against the council’s decision in November, and the final judgment, expected this autumn, will rest with the secretary of state. McAllister says that if the new town is granted approval, it will probably be the most ecofriendly development in Europe. “The way of the future is to find the right life-work balance,” he says, “and this is the first development that Friends of the Earth has ever publicly supported.”

Many of the locals beg to differ – even if refusal of the scheme might mean more intensive use of the airfield, which would mean more aircraft noise.

“The proposed site is in the heart of some of the most beautiful countryside in the region, on the edge of the green belt,” says Martin Howell, 42, a record-company director who has recently renovated his Tudor family home just off the village green. “It is surrounded by an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and an Area of Great Landscape Value, part of our heritage, adjoining the Surrey Hills and a Site of Special Scientific Interest. All of which will be irreparably damaged by this proposed development. Once it is gone, it is gone for ever.”

Alexander Creswell, 52, a watercolourist who lives in a Basque-style villa in the Surrey Hills, agrees. “In summer, thousands of hikers, walkers, cyclists and picnickers visit Pitch Hill, Holmbury Hill and Hascombe Hill, where there are matchless views of the Surrey countryside,” he says. “On clear days, you can see all the way over the South Downs to the sea. Rutland put a jumbo jet on the site at one point, and I worked out that the new town would be the equivalent of seeing 230 jumbo jets parked on the site. I ask walkers what they think of that, and they are just astonished. It would make Arcadia sub-rural.”

www.dunsfoldpark.com; www.sdpnt.com

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