BRITAIN’S POPULATION

Dominion, Volume 15, Issue 42, 12 November 1921, Page 10

BRITAIN’S POPULATION

A CENTURY’S GROWTH. According to the census, in a century, and in spite of wars, tft.6 population of Great Britain has been trebled,, as the following figures show:— 18”1 .. 14,091,747 1881 ... 29,710,012 1831 ... 16,261,183 1891 - 33,028,172 1841 ... 18,534,332 1901 ./. 36,999.946 1851 .. 20,816,351 1911 — 40,831.396 1861 ... 23,128,518 1921 ... 42,767,530 1871 ... 26,072,284 “Serious thoughts are suggested by the comparison between the movements in the urban and rural districts generally, says the “Telegraph.” “It was believed during the war that there might be a disposition to go ‘back to the land, and redress the balance of town and country. If that occurred it was a transient phase which is not indicated in the statistics. “These tell the familiar tala of depleted villages and congested cities. It is the great towns and their suburban' annexes which advance * the agricultural divisions are stationary or’declining, lhe rural districts, which in 1891 contained between a third and a half as many persons as the urban districts, had sunk by 1921 to not much more than a quarJf. < “Nearly four-fifths of the English and Welsh people now live in towns, and only just over one-fifth in extra-rural areas. Twenty of the counties actually show a decline, which has to be set oft against the rise in others like Middlesex, Essex Kent, and Lancashire, where tlie great’civic or industrial masses congregate. It. is another point for grave and even anxious thought. Has any other country been known in which over 79 per cent, of the inhabitants, are town dwellers and town' workers?”