Plans to build thousands of homes to meet government targets will 'wipe out' Thomas Hardy's Wessex landscape and turn it into a 'concrete jungle', campaigners have said.
Developers have unveiled computer generated images that show how 950 acres of countryside that inspired the Victorian novelist will become a massive housing estate.
The 3,750 homes to the north of Dorchester will obliterate the fields and water meadows Hardy wrote about his his famous work The Mayor of Casterbridge.
In the book, Hardy wrote that Dorchester stood with 'regard to the wide fertile land adjoining, clean-cut and distinct, like a chessboard on a green table-cloth'.
The Thomas Hardy Society are objecting to the plans along with the local town council, the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE) and local residents.
