“THE city wants growth: we want to thrive and prosper,” exclaims Marco Cereste, the perma-tanned Conservative leader of Peterborough council, thumping the red velvet covered table in his office to emphasise the point. And that, insists Mr Cereste, means building more houses. Peterborough, once a sleepy cathedral city near Cambridge, has seen its population grow by 17% over the past decade, to 183,000. Since being designated a “new town” in 1967, it has doubled in size.

Peterborough is one of a select group of cities and towns in south-east England that are happily sprawling outward, like small versions of Fort Worth or Houston. Swindon, a Victorian railway town in Wiltshire, and Milton Keynes, a chunk of American suburbia in the middle of Buckinghamshire, are growing just as fast (see chart). The English may think of themselves as a pastoral people, and most are broadly NIMBYish, preferring development to take place elsewhere. But along the motorways and railway lines there is another England of concrete and glass, of shopping malls and new semi-detached houses, each with two cars in the drive. Milton Keynes, Peterborough and Swindon were chosen as locations for expansion in the 1950s and 1960s, when the government was looking for places to put Londoners displaced from demolished slums. They are all on motorways connected to London and have decent train links. Milton Keynes, the best performing of the three, is almost exactly half way between London and Birmingham. Swindon is between London and Bristol, and benefits from the vitality of nearby Oxford, just as Peterborough does from Cambridge. But they are also designed to grow, in a way few British cities are. As Mark Clapson, a historian of Milton Keynes, points out, in the 1980s both that city and Peterborough ran national TV advertising campaigns intended to attract families and businesses. The campaigns are now gone, as are the quasi-private development corporations founded to develop the cities. But the pro-growth corporate mindset remains. Peterborough’s council pitches for business abroad with an outfit named “Opportunity Peterborough”. “Forward Swindon” does the same job for that town. (In Milton Keynes they feel that the city name is brand enough.) This expansionist attitude is reflected in policy. Whereas similarly well-placed cities in the south-east such as Oxford or Guildford are restrained by green belts and Byzantine planning processes, these places embrace developers. In Milton Keynes plots of land wait ready to be built on with roads and other infrastructure already in place, like missing teeth in the blocks of the American-style city grid. In Swindon the edge of the city is marked by building sites and brand-new houses.

Mr Cereste reckons that the job of Peterborough’s planning department is to “get stuff coming out of the ground”. His administration wants to build 14,200 more houses over the next decade, increasing the total supply by a fifth. Milton Keynes anticipates building close to 17,500 over the same period and Swindon a similar number. All three have local plans which assume lots of growth, with a commensurate amount of land set aside.

As a result, housing and commercial property costs much less than in nearby spots. Cheap land near the motorways attracts businesses like Amazon, which has set up a distribution centre in Peterborough, and Network Rail, which has its headquarters in Milton Keynes. Affordable housing helps them retain workers. In Peterborough the average semi-detached family home costs £131,000 ($212,000), less than a third of the price of a similar-sized house in London. Milton Keynes and Swindon are almost as cheap.

Can the three keep it up? Much of their growth now comes from immigrants. In Milton Keynes, on the edge of the enormous modernist mall full of bright chain stores, there is a flea market with stalls selling Afro-Caribbean and Asian foods. In Peterborough, Polish mothers drag their bilingual children away from McDonald’s. Some long-standing residents are uneasy about their increasing numbers, which may check expansion. And not everyone loves the smell of concrete. Peterborough’s Conservative MP, Stewart Jackson, fiercely objects to the council’s plans for growth, which he says are “mad”.

In all three towns businesses complain that attracting highly skilled staff, especially those with degrees, is hard. Young people who do well tend to leave. The towns lack decent bars and restaurants in the centre, and so are deserted after workers drive home at six o’clock. They all want to build universities over the next decade (Peterborough and Milton Keynes already have offshoots of nearby universities). Students, local leaders hope, will bring a little “vibrancy” (an unavoidable buzzword) to quiet town centres.

This strategy seems a bit dubious—after all, the success of these places is built on their homely, suburban feel. The fake lawn on sale in Milton Keynes’s mall and Peterborough’s many cultural festivals are unlikely to attract students. But it shows how far these once-tiny towns have come: with universities, they will become real cities. If only a few other English towns would follow their path.