In no country can there be a stronger prejudice against suburbia than in Britain. One needs only recall the special issue of the Architectural Review from the 1950s, called Outrage, which described a country steamrolled into uniformity by private house builders. This is odd. After all, the British, and more particularly London, have been instrumental in the invention of the suburb and could within reason take pride in the achievement.

In the twentieth century, however, the British contribution made by architects to the suburbs has been almost unnoticeable. With few exceptions (Parker & Unwin’s garden suburbs and, in the 1960s, Eric Lyons’s SPAM housing), there has been in Britain little interest and still less creativity among architects in low density urban planning and in low-cost housing. The mere mention of names like Wimpy or Barratt (Britain’s best known house builders) is enough to get architects to run for cover in the cities.

Approximately half of the population of Britain live in suburbs. But influential architecture firms have consistently stayed away from them. Many believe that the combination of low-income house buyers and the private sector is incompatible with the proper exercise of architecture – a belief that is not wholly unjustified. For all the commercialism of Foster & Partners, for all the populism of Richard Rogers, architects in Britain work under the conviction that there can be no urbanity (or for that matter, suburbanity) in the suburbs, that the only genuine urbanity is Italian.

Such is a legacy of ‘townscape’, of the cult of the Mediterranean world and of village life. Suburbs simply do not register in this order of value. They are untouched by notions of quality, and they cannot as such be the object of design attention. There has been, it is true, attempts at both local and national government level to improve the quality of public spaces on the model of Barcelona, but it is difficult to see how these spaces could survive in London’s lower densities and less hospitable climate.

In any case, this is not what the suburbs need. The British response to low density is to wheel out the cart of the Picturesque out of the barn. The Picturesque, it is felt, will introduce quality where there was none. It might just do this in a few chosen places, like it did in Hampstead, Turnham Green and, further away, in Poundbury, Dorchester. But while it was well-suited to the estates of the gentry, can make little difference in the boundlessness of suburbia. Most memorably, the point was made by Adriaan Geuze and his students when, in 1995, they laid one million Monopoly-size houses under the arcade of the NAi. Design in the suburbs resides at the intersection between quality and quantity, between architectural design and urban planning, between taste and statistics.

The resulting conflict defines the pathos of the suburb. Of this, no nation has shown a better understanding than the Dutch. Not, as often assumed in Britain, because Dutch architects were able to bring design quality to bear upon the crushing anonymity of numbers but, to the contrary, because they were able to supplement quality with a willingness to understand the logic of numbers. In short, they had a desire to engage with the brief. Hence Borneo Sporenburg, hence Leidsche Rijn, Yppenburg and IJ-burg. This, surely, must be the reason why several Dutch practices are currently working in the Thames Gateway region to the east of London.

But can one refer to a “Dutch invasion”, as a recent article did in the magazine Building Design? Within the next 10 years, the British government plans to build some 240,000 homes per year - or 2,400,000 within the next 10 years. The policy has prompted much debate and it recalls the impact of VINEX in Holland in the late 1990s. Given this context, the 15,000 homes planned at Stratford and Barking with some Dutch involvement (KCAP, Maccreanor Lavington, Maxwan, West 8) could hardly be described as an invasion.

These projects are the outcome of a 10-year long process, starting in the mid 1990s with the effective diffusion of the NAi and Archis, extended with matching publicity in the UK and elsewhere in Europe. Officials and influential figures took notice, among them Richard Rogers and Ricky Burdett, then of the Urban Task Force which sought to influence government policy, later as advisors to the Mayor of London. It is hardly surprising or untoward that this should have resulted in a few high profile architects’ appointments.

A great deal more could be hoped for besides the involvement of some of the most capable urban planners in Europe on sites of high visibility. The example of 15,000 homes will not in itself renew the culture of urban planning and housing in Britain. The problem is not that there are too many Dutch architects working in the UK, or for that matter that there are too few, but that the infrastructure that permitted their success at home is hardly in place in Britain. There is plenty more that can be learnt from the Netherlands.