A nation in numbers

Boris Starling and David Bradbury take a statistical look at the 20th century

As the Office for National Statistics rolls out its 2021 Census of 'ngland and Wales, David Bradbury and Boris Starling reveal what statistics can tell us about seven aspects of British life over the past century – from immigration rates to our changing taste in baby names

The number of people being born is a fundamentally important statistic – it is, after all, one of the key determinants in the size of the population. The birth rate has generally been on the decline since the turn of the 0th|century, not surprising given developments such as the huge fall in the infant mortality rate (15|per cent in 1 00 0 per cent in 01 ) and the development of reliable contraception.

But this has not been a straight-line decline: the number of births in the si dipped beloY a million for the first time in 1 15 but by 1 0 had soared bacM up to 1 1 million the highest on record. uhy the rapid rise? 9ell perhaps it Yas simply the eʘect of demobilisation bringing couples back together. Or maybe it was a conscious desire to replace the population lost in the war and Spanish ʚu pandemic

Birth rates fell again when the country was plunged into Yar in 1 *oYever on this occasion, the number of births did not continue to decline throughout the conʚict – it actually bottomed out in 1 1

Famously, the postwar years saw a strong recovery to the eZtent that the late 1 0s through to the early 1 0s became MnoYn as the “baby boom”.

+n the final decades of the 0th century birth rates fell once more, plunging to a low of 5 0 in 1 but it has rallied slightly since, reaching a recent peak in 2012 at almost 1 000