ABSTRACT
In recent years, the pace of change not only in sport and leisure, but in our quality of life generally, has been rapid. We are now enjoying higher standards of living, filled with goods, services, activities and opportunities that in past years seemed unimaginable. This has been fed by rising incomes, technological advances and greater mobility of people, to name a few of the underlying factors. But many of the more developed economies also have increasing inequality between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ (see pp. 75-6), which has implications for leisure, particularly for public sector providers. And there are worrying trends in the proportions of populations who are overweight and obese – particularly in the USA and UK but also in other more developed countries. This chapter explores major trends relevant to sport and leisure, i.e. changes over time, five years and more. The core evidence used relates to the UK because of the availability of consistent data, particularly from Leisure Forecasts, which is a trends and forecasting publication from the Leisure Industries Research Centre at Sheffield Hallam University (e.g.
