Escaping the city? It’s been going on ever since the ’60s
As study shows how life has changed in six decades:
THE mass movement of households out of our cities is not just a product of the pandemic – it’s been going on for six decades, according to an official analysis yesterday.
It said the exodus began in the 1960s, when families began to leave behind rented terraced houses with little space and primitive bathroom arrangements.
As they found themselves wealthy enough to buy their own homes, rural areas became ‘urbanised’, said the report from the Office for National Statistics.
It also said the exchange of cramped Victorian terraces for more spacious suburban owner-occupation has occurred alongside dramatic social change, with divorce now ten times more common than it was at the beginning of the 1960s.
The report is published following an unprecedented boom over the past year in regional and rural house prices as thousands of families have taken advantage of working from home to move away from tightly-packed urban areas and suburban commuter districts. Many have been searching for more room and outdoor space.
However, evidence from once-in-a-decade national censuses shows how the pandemic housing boom is just the latest stage of a five-decades-long process.
The report said: ‘Places that saw an increase in population proportion between censuses were generally areas that in 1961 were classed as rural districts. As cities spread, people moved and the new towns were built, some of these previously rural districts became more urbanised.’
The biggest cities in england and Wales at the beginning of the sixties – Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, Sheffield and Bristol – were still the biggest in 2011, it said. But it added: ‘Of those six urban centres, five also saw the biggest reductions in the proportion of the population of england and Wales they were home to between censuses. The city of Birmingham, as it was defined in 1961, went from housing 2.4 per cent of the population to 1.7 per cent.’
Six decades ago, large numbers of homes had outside toilets and no plumbed-in bath. The ONS said: ‘The census that year [1961] asked if people had a toilet inside or attached to the home they were living in. Nearly seven per cent of households in england and Wales did not.’
The proportion of the population who live in homes they own has risen from 42 per cent to 64 per cent, the report said, with ownership heavily boosted by Margaret Thatcher’s right-tobuy policy. It has, however, fallen in recent years as a result of high prices and the impact of the 2008 recession.
The improvement in conditions has not been matched by an increase in the stability of the families who enjoy them, the ONS said.
At the time of the 1961 census, 68 per cent of those aged 16 and over were married and 0.8 per cent were divorced. In the 2011 census, this had changed to 49 per cent of those aged 16 and over married or in a same-sex civil partnership, and nine per cent divorced or in a legally dissolved civil partnership.
‘Searching for more room’