Florida comes to East London

John Prescott will today reveal plans to build a massive housing development in east London inspired by a model town in Florida.

The Deputy Prime Minister will announce plans for 11,000 new homes in Barking Reach, in the Thames Gateway.

The scheme follows a visit by Mr Prescott to the town of Seaside in Florida this summer. The town was used in the film The Truman Show, and is regarded as a a template for modern housing development in the USA.

The scheme will also draw strongly on Prince Charles's vision of the ideal village, Poundbury in Dorset, created 10 years ago.

Seaside was designed to mix family homes with individual apartments and places a strong emphasis on ensuring there is plenty of local shopping and restaurants.

Both communities, although they have much smaller populations than that envisaged for Barking Reach, offer Mr Prescott models for rapid development mixed with quality design. The Deputy Prime Minister is desperate to see more new low-cost homes in London and the South-East to provide affordable property for essential workers, including nurses, teachers and policemen.

Mr Prescott will today share a platform with the Prince at a conference-on urban planning where the proposals for Barking Reach will be outlined. Dutch designers are working on the overall plan for the 150-hectare site, formerly owned by National Power.

Although the Prince is proud of Poundbury, the £22 million experimental village near Dorchester, critics have condemned it for having a "chocolate-box" image.

Town planners and architects criticised it for what they saw as a twee approach, bearing little relation to the demands of modern living.

The office of the Deputy Prime Minister wants to build a total of 1.1 million homes in the South-East to cope with chronic shortages in housing supply and the needs of the UK's fastest growing regions.

The Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, Mr Prescott's design watchdog, said the new project was a "great chance to get urban design principles right" after failures in the sixties and seventies.

The investment costs and profits of the Barking Reach scheme will be shared by English Partnerships, the government's housing regeneration agency, and Bellway Homes.