ABSTRACT
The phenomenon of a turnaround in rural populations, with decades of slow population loss being suddenly replaced by in-migration and growth, was first recognised in the United States in the early 1970s and led Berry to coin the word counter-urbanization to denote the pattern. In much of Europe this new pattern of population change had to await the censuses of the years 1980-82 for full investigation, but since then an impressive body of empirical evidence has built up to affirm the generality of this process of population de-concentration from urban areas and regrowth in many rural regions. Counter-urbanization in the United Kingdom was first described by Champion in 1981. The pattern as it appeared then, and its evolution in the following years, consists of a clear decline in the populations of the great metropolitan centres such as London, the West Midlands, Merseyside, Greater Manchester, South and West Yorkshire, and Central Scotland.
