Britain: An official handbook > 1966

l6 BRITAIN: AN OFFICIAL HANDBOOK
national rate, while many of the older industrial towns and remote country
areas in northern England, Wales and Scotland and some coastal resorts have
had relatively small increases. The differences result from the combined effect
of natural increase in almost all areas and net migration towards the expanding
employment opportunities of the midlands and south and towards certain
retirement areas, mainly on the south coast.
Throughout Britain the population is predominantly urban and suburban,
although there may be access to large parks, commons and other expanses
of open country within the urban area.
During the nineteenth century the labour demands of newly developing
industry drew great numbers from the countryside; by the end of the
century three-quarters of the British population was living in towns and the
large conurbation was already the dominant type of British community. During
the twentieth century the suburbs of the towns in these population centres
have continued to spread and merge. Since 1921 nearly 40 per cent of the
population has lived in the seven great conurbations whose centres are the
cities of London, Manchester (South-East Lancashire), Birmingham and
Wolverhampton (West Midlands), Glasgow (Central Clydeside), Leeds and
Bradford (West Yorkshire), Liverpool (Merseyside), and Newcastle upon
Tyne. Even the 20 per cent of the population who live in areas classed
administratively as rural include many who regularly work, shop or go to
school in towns.1
Urban Dispersal A development which has been accelerating in recent years is the long-
established tendency for the number of people who actually have their homes
in the inner parts of an area (especially the town or city centre itself) to
decrease, and be balanced or surpassed by the increase of population in and
beyond the outer suburban fringes, where development commonly extends
without a break beyond the administrative boundaries and includes areas
which are administratively rural. For this reason the statistics of conurbations,
comprising continuously built-up, economically and socially interdependent
areas, are in many ways more illuminating than those for urban administrative
areas.
In some cases even the conurbation, as defined for statistical purposes,
does not cover the whole of developments on the outskirts. This applies
most strikingly to London. The population of Greater London, after falling
between 1951 and 1961, showed a very slight increase by 1964; but there is a
broad belt of almost continuous population increase which now completely
encircles it, includes and passes beyond all existing London new towns and
extends along every major rail and road route from London. This belt contains
both commuters, who have moved their homes but continue to travel to work
in inner London, and people who have changed both home and work place
from inner London to new or expanded towns. Other areas in which outward
movement and fringe development have been noticeably large are the outer
areas of the West Midlands and Merseyside conurbations and areas on the
edges of Bristol, Derby, Leicester, Norwich, Oxford, Portsmouth and Sheffield.
Thus it is that Table 2, as well as showing decreases since 1951 for the urban
administrative areas of Glasgow and nine other cities, shows such small
increases since 1951 (because of this further spreading out of population) even
in the officially defined conurbations of South-East Lancashire, West Mid¬
lands, the West Riding of Yorkshire, and Merseyside, and in the London and
south-eastern region.
1 About 3^ per cent of the total working population are engaged in agriculture.