ABSTRACT
When this story opens the population of England numbered less than 34 millions, distributed in some seven million households and a lesser number of dwellings. Eighty years later the population size was over 46 millions, and there were nearly a million more dwellings than the nation’s eighteen and a half million households. Over the middle decades of the century the population had made net gains from migration, with the consequence that by the 1990s slightly over 6 per cent belonged to ethnic minorities, the black minorities, in particular, being heavily concentrated in the big conurbations. The fraction of people who lived in the care of others, in institutions of various kinds, was tiny – less than half a per cent – and it had fallen by nearly a half since 1914.
