Recent changes in the pace of population deconcentration in Britain

This paper uses the official annual population estimates to examine changes in the scale of urban-rural shift in the distribution of the British population since the 1960s. These reveal that the level of population deconcentration at regional and more local scales stood at its highest at the beginning of the 1970s and that since the mid 1970s the rate of population loss experienced by London and several other large cities has diminished markedly. An analysis of the components of population change reveals that trends in net migration have been primarily responsible, though generally reinforced by trends in natural change rates. It is concluded that, contrary to the impression of counterurbanisation being largely a feature of the 1970s as has generally been conveyed by the decennial analyses of Census data, most of that decade featured the downwave of a longer cycle of decentralisation which had its origins at least as early as the first half of the 1960s. Explanations for the rise of counterurbanisation in Britain should be sought primarily in this earlier decade, whereas the circumstances of the 1970s now appear more appropriate for explaining the subsequent slowdown in the process. This paper puts forward five sets of factors which seem to accord with this temporal pattern and which are believed to form a suitable starting point for its fuller explanation.