please empty your brain below
Another factor is that the population of the UK was about 46 million in 1936, so London represented about 20% of the whole.

Now, the UK population is about 64 million, so the proportion living in Greater London is "only" about 13%.

Andrew | 06.01.15 - 1:32 a.m. | #

Did deaths from WW2 contribute to the decline or was it mainly people moving out?

JQ | 06.01.15 - 6:48 a.m. | #

DG - you have presented this topic with such clarity and vivid use of graphics that the post should be required on the screen of every public official in London this morning.

Bob Lindsay-Smith | 06.01.15 - 7:45 a.m. | #

I was always a little sad when in the post war decades London was losing population. Milton Keynes, Basingstoke and other new towns being built/expanded to re-house people. It became fashionable not to want to live in London and I knew several people who moved out. Daft I though they were. This led to a slow decline. Underused railways lines threatened with closure,- even the North London line Richmond to then Broad Street, now Stratford) a busy part of the Overground network today, was planned to close. Less buses etc.
I am so pleased that people are coming back, now lets improve the infrastructure a.s.a.p.

John | 06.01.15 - 7:55 a.m. | #

The current boundary of Greater London is an anachronism when talking about 1939. Although at the time they did have the concept of a 'Greater London', but it was the Metropolitan Police District as it was then, which had a somewhat different boundary, although a very similar population to the figures we are using for 1939.

Steve | 06.01.15 - 8:43 a.m. | #

Brilliant article, very well researched and presented. Thank you DG!

BJD | 06.01.15 - 10:35 a.m. | #

Borough's population change since 1981 show dramatic story: Tower Hamlets and Newham both added around 100,000 residents.

Boneyboy | 06.01.15 - 10:51 a.m. | #

@Boneyboy

It's dramatic but those 2011 levels are just back to 1951 levels so overall not much has changed in 60 years. A dip in the 80s that's all.

Newham: 1951=294017, 1981=209128, 2011=308000

TH: 1951=230000, 1981=140000, 2011=254100

| 06.01.15 - 12:55 p.m. | #

so it seems my family was right on trend, post-war my parents moved us out of London (right out of London, way up north) ... I've been here since the 70's adding to the population increase ... however the kids have mostly voted with their feet and left London and I'm seriously considering following them

Caroline | 06.01.15 - 2:28 p.m. | #

@Caroline
Similarly - my family moved north in 1959, I moved back to inner London in 1976/81 (depending on how you count my student years) and to outer London ten years later.

Were we following the trend, or setting it?

timbo | 06.01.15 - 5:48 p.m. | #

Trend or no trend, if we set it or follow it, if we don't it all matters little in the face of the fact that too many people live in such a small space. In the long-term it cannot continue...if it goes unchecked then no amount of infrastructure is going to cope. Only have to look at the current alerts at hospitals and that is without any major disease or disaster. To add to the problems is the growing inequality of society which is getting wider by the year. I can't picture a London of 2050 with 10 million population being a great city to live and work in. Hope I'm wrong...but only a strong focus on "quality of life" for all and not just a select few will bring any positve change to what looks like a dire future for many.

E | 06.01.15 - 6:47 p.m. | #

@E

There is a major disaster in this country, and it is that the government has encouraged a culture where there are millions of frail elderly people living alone with the family only really coming because they care about their inheritance. They fall down at home and manage to get up, but the one time they don't, they get brought to hospital and stay there for months while social services struggle to sort something out for them, because the hospital will be blamed if they go home and fall down again. Meanwhile they catch norovirus or pneumonia and sometimes die.

The alerts at hospitals are mostly outside London.

John | 06.01.15 - 6:55 p.m. | #

On the first map, as well as nearly all of Middlesex, and parts of Essex, Kent and Surrey, Greater London also absorbed Barnet from Hertfordshire. Potters Bar moved from Middlesex to Herts at the same time.

Nick | 06.01.15 - 7:44 p.m. | #

Of course you’re right in pointing out that there was no Greater London in 1939, but then you go on to use the names of the current London Boroughs, which also didn’t exist until 1965, to label population figures going back to 1811! I can see that that helps to make things clearer - it would be a pain to keep writing, and reading, “what is now Tower Hamlets,” “which now comprises Havering” and so on - but it seems inconsistent to sniff at one anachronism while deploying a whole set of them, and not even mentioning that they are anachronisms.
Grumble, grumble, mutter, mutter, but only because I really enjoy this blog and this rare case of inconsistency bothers me.

The Ghost of Sidney Webb | 07.01.15 - 6:54 a.m. | #

> "The alerts at hospitals are mostly outside London"

That because *hospitals* are mostly outside London, genius.

| 07.01.15 - 5:28 p.m. | #

Did some reading on this myself and thought I understood that the 1939 figures were not a approximation of the population of the areas of the existing boundary, but were the 1939 understanding of 'Greater London' which used the boundary of the Metropolitan Police District - which is significantly larger than the current Greater London - including well populated bits of essex and surrey (Loughton, Staines etc)

jamesup | 20.01.15 - 10:52 a.m. | #

Its a shame your research wasn't referenced in this uncannily similar article in the Economist this week:

http://www.economist.com/news/britain/21642195-londons-population-same-size-it-was-1939-looks-very-different-capital

John Mac | 12.02.15 - 1:08 p.m. | #











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