In 1875, Octavia Hill, the patron saint of housing management and one of the founders of the National Trust, called for a green belt to be placed around London to stop the city sprawling over the surrounding countryside.
Had she succeeded, places such as Brixton, Kilburn and Stratford would still be villages surrounded by fields and woods and London would be a provincial backwater rather than a global capital.
The notion of Victorian London being frozen in time and space seems absurd to us now. Yet in 1947, with the passing of the Town and Country Planning Act, Octavia Hill's spiritual heirs (notably Sir Patrick Abercrombie, who created the Greater London Plan and was a founder of the Campaign to Protect Rural England) succeeded where she had failed.
London was encased in an inviolate green belt, three times larger than the capital itself, that has remained in place ever since. Its natural growth was halted; thousands of London's workers are forced to "jump" the green belt every day from a commuter belt that stretches from Lincolnshire to the Isle of Wight and from Oxfordshire to the Isle of Thanet.
Abercrombie's aim was to stem the spread of London and, although its population declined steadily until the mid-1980s, London is now predicted to grow to 10 million people over the next 20 years – that's 2 million more Londoners who will need decent housing.
London will have to build up to 1 million new homes to house its growing population and to cope with the backlog, yet it has only 4,000 hectares of brownfield land, barely enough to provide a fifth of what is needed.
To house itself, London must either build upwards or outwards. A new generation of tower blocks is unlikely, so outward growth seems the only answer.
Within the M25, there are 110,000 hectares of green belt land. Even if we built on a third of it, we could provide more than 1 million new and affordable homes. First-time buyers could have a chance to get on the housing ladder, we could restore some sort of sanity to London's crazy housing market and, most importantly of all, we could at last house the poorest and most vulnerable Londoners, instead of sending them off to Stoke and other northern districts.
Most towns and cities expand to their ring roads or by-passes. Why should London be any different? Pushing London out to the M25 could also help to transform London into a greener city by forcing lungs of countryside into the heart of the capital – providing, for example, the elbow room to create a proper system of cycle lanes, helping to reduce the capital's appalling levels of air pollution.
Yet the subject of outward growth was not mentioned once during the recent mayoral election. All of the candidates seemed to think that London can house itself within its present boundaries. They are wrong.
Boris Johnson even made an explicit pledge to protect the green belt, 35,000 hectares of which sit in the outer London boroughs – not surprising, given that his support is strongest in these boroughs. But, although he has a housing budget of more than £3bn and 500 hectares of land at his disposal, he simply does not have enough ammunition to solve London's growing housing crisis.
London has simply run out of space and its out-of-date green belt is the culprit. This is the real story behind the Newham's social cleansing story, and unless City Hall is prepared to face up to the need for London to expand, I can guarantee that we will see more shock and horror stories highlighting London's housing crisis over the coming months.
Colin Wiles is a housing and planning consultant