ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the nineteenth century most of the inhabitants of the United Kingdom lived in the country. According to the first official census in 1801, the population of England and Wales was 8.8 million, 7.3 million of whom lived in the countryside. In 1831 agriculture still accounted for the largest sector of the country’s labour force, giving work to 28 per cent of all families. By 1851 the population had risen to nearly 18 million, half of them living in urban areas. London, which had grown in size from just over 1 million in 1801 to 2.6 million in 1851, was by far the largest city, but industrial centres such as Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham had also expanded at an unprecedented rate. In 1801 Birmingham had 71,000 inhabitants; fifty years later there were 233,000 people living in the city, while Manchester had grown from 75,000 to 303,000 and Liverpool from 82,000 to 376,000. By the middle of the twentieth century London’s population was 8.3 million and Birmingham’s 1.1 million, while Manchester and Liverpool had 703,000 and 789,000 inhabitants respectively. It seems that 1951 represented the peak population in the large cities, for at the time of the 1961 census London had 8.1 million inhabitants, while other large cities showed similar small, but none the less significant, falls in population.
