Manchester’s a city with youth on its side
MANCHESTER is the youngest place in Britain outside London – and it’s getting even more youthful, according to new data.
Analysis of official statistics by the M.E.N. reveals the average age of people living in Manchester is 33.1.
It’s the joint-fourth youngest average age in Britain, behind the east London boroughs of Tower Hamlets, Newham and Barking and Dagenham.
And the figures from the Office for National Statistics show Manchester has been getting younger over the last decade – the average age of people in the city in 2010 was 33.4 years old.
The figures are echoed in Salford, the only other area of the region getting younger.
In turn Stockport and Wigan are the only two areas of Greater Manchester where the average person in 2016 was more than 40 years old.
The new figures show the shift towards youth in Greater Manchester is the exact opposite of what’s happening across the UK more widely. The average person in the UK was exactly 40 years old in 2016 compared to 39.3 in 2010.
Outside of Manchester and Salford, Oldham is the youngest borough, with the average age in 2016 said to be 37.7 years old, followed by Rochdale, Bolton, Trafford, Tameside, Bury, Wigan and Stockport.
The figures show West Somerset had the oldest people in Britain, with the average person living there aged just short of their 50th birthday at 49.2 years old.
The average person in the youngest part of the country – Tower Hamlets in east London – was only 31.7 years old.
Professor Hannah Smithson, head of the Manchester Centre for Youth Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University, said: “Manchester should use its status as the youngest city outside London to create a city that addresses the needs and priorities of young people.”
Averages are as accurate as possible, although the Office of National Statistics groups everyone aged 90 or older as a 90-year-old in their population estimates. This means that these averages are likely to be a very slightly lower estimate than in reality, particularly for areas with a high number of very old people.