And now a local history post. Don't worry, it's also a local history post about where you live. Stay with me.
The London borough of Tower Hamlets, where I live, has been around since 1965. Before then it was three metropolitan boroughs (Bethnal Green, Stepney and Poplar). Before that it was a slum-ridden chunk of east Middlesex. Go back far enough, before trade and transport transformed the place, and it was mostly rural with the odd big village. Changed, irrevocably, utterly.
This change is reflected in the area's population figures. Here's a list showing how many people lived within the boundaries of modern Tower Hamlets over the last two centuries...
1801: 131,000 (a lot of people already, the East End got packed out early) 1851: 330,000 (more than doubled, as docks and the railways drew more people in) 1901: 578,000 (Cockneyfolk living in overcrowded slummy hell) 1951: 233,000 (all bombed out, with rebuilding underway) 1981: 140,000 (post-war low, everyone's moved out to the suburbs) 2001: 196,000 (climbing again thanks to yuppies and immigration)
That's an astonishing rise and fall. I think Tower Hamlets' population figures are better shown as a graph...
You'll see I've also added Croydon's population figures as a comparison. A very different story. Two centuries ago Croydon was an intensely rural area with fewer than ten thousand residents. And then the railways came, and the population's barely stopped rising since. All of London's major recent growth has been in the outer suburbs, so no wonder they're Boris's main priority. (Of course you don't get the full story without also considering population density. Croydon's about five times the size of Tower Hamlets, so my local borough's still more overcrowded than anywhere in Outer London. And in 1901, ridiculously more overcrowded)
I found these figures on the Vision of Britain website. It's a lottery-sponsored online project based at the University of Portsmouth - a 'geographical survey' featuring two centuries of maps, statistical trends and historical descriptions. Type in where you live, be it Bristol, the Derbyshire Dales or the Outer Hebrides, and you can view a wide range of themed statistics for your borough. I've concentrated on Total Population, but you could also explore (for example) issues of industry, class and education. Hurrah for free census data, where would social historians be without it?
It's probably much more interesting to investigate where you live than where I live, so I'll leave you to it.
