Exclusive: Create Streets proposes building on Britain’s ‘road belt’ rather than its green belt amid housing crisis

Needlessly wide roads should be torn up and replaced with boulevards of new housing, a thinktank led by the UK government’s most senior urbanism adviser has proposed, in a move likely to delight green belt campaigners but rile the motoring lobby.

Create Streets wants sweeping T-junctions tightened, vast roundabouts “tamed” and expressways narrowed according to a paper to be circulated to ministers and seen by the Guardian.