Data released by the Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence in January this year suggested that 700,000 people left London last year. This was not because of covid, it was European nationals leaving because of Brexit. As a result London’s population may have fallen last year for the first time since the 1970s.

Population has always interested me. The general narrative for much of my lifetime has been that there are just too many of us. This relates to the global population of course, but it also feeds into the ‘Britain is full’ – ‘cities are over-crowded’ – ‘concreting over our green and pleasant land’ – ‘coming over here stealing our jobs’ – rhetoric that led to Brexit in the first place.

For many years this was at odds with my professional experience. Working in Northern England the fundamental problem, the one that lay behind all of the problems of urban decay and economic decline was a falling population. Manchester’s population was falling until the mid 1990s and other northern towns and cities were losing population well into the 2000s and maybe still are today. You may recall the Labour government’s Housing Market Renewal programme, an ill-judged and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to address these issues.

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