London population to reach record high next year

At some point in the New Year it will be formally announced that Greater London’s population is the biggest in its history. City Hall number crunchers are trying to pin down a date to proclaim that the previous high of 8.615 million has been topped.

Some may be surprised that the present record figure was hit not recently but in 1939, the first year of World War II. London survived the Blitz but spent the next four decades thinning out. The 1981 census showed a fall in population to just over 6.6 million. Then came the upturn. By 2011, numbers had risen above 8 million again. Now forecasters say we’re surging towards 9 million by 2020, 10 million by 2030 and even 11 million by 2050.

This ongoing boom, driven primarily by birthrate, is the context for the capital’s campaigns for more transport infrastructure, more housing and more control over its own fiscal and social policy affairs in an age of public finance austerity. It also provides the backdrop for political debates about how London should cope with containing more people than ever before. But, looking back to those post-war decades when numbers slumped, it is impressive how familiar some of the debates are and how little some things have changed.

In his excellent 1977 book London: The Heartless City, David Wilcox explored the transport dilemmas of a capital facing a future which, at that time, seemed threatened by continuing decline. Car use was rising and gridlock feared. In 1967, Labour had gone into the Greater London Council elections backing the creation of a “new and efficient network of roads” for the “motor age”, concentrating on new Outer London rings. There would be a “motorway box” around Inner London, the party declared. The Conservatives did not disagree, supporting the same approach into the 1970s. As Wilcox documented, Labour then changed its mind. By 1973 it was rejecting the “reckless and irrelevant Tory plan for ringways” which it said would only attract more traffic and congestion.

Where are the two big parties today? Still quite attached to the “motor age”, it seems. Car use and ownership in London is on the wane, yet congestion is expected to increase. As outer east London develops, there’s a Labour-Tory consensus that new road links are required to span the Thames east of Tower Bridge. Boris Johnson, while resisting pressure from Conservative AMs to do away with the congestion charge, is hatching plans to revive the ringway concept below ground. Darryl Chamberlain, a firm opponent of the Silvertown Tunnel, contends that it doesn’t make much difference if we “bury the damn thing”. The case for extra roads of any kind needs to address the objections he raises.

Wilcox described the housing problems London faced in the mid-seventies. Councils had spent huge sums on building and private developers had boosted the stock further. “The number of homes is virtually the same as the number of households,” Wilcox wrote. Yet although London’s population was falling, waiting lists for council homes were lengthening and 15,000 London families were recognised as homeless. There was a mismatch between supply and need. Yes, that rings a bell.

The book also sets out some striking statistics about morning commutes. In 1961, 1.26 million people entered Central London each day during the morning peak of 07:00-10:00. There was a fall off for a while but then the story changed. During this century “modal share” has shifted - more rail, more bus, more cycling - but Transport for London’s latest Central London Peak Count report shows that the long-term numbers haven’t altered much at all. The figure of 1.17 million for 2012 was the highest since 1978. And though the graph has curved up a bit in recent years this seems modest in the context of overall growth in transport demand.

The reasons for that aren’t mysterious: more people, more places to go, more employment hotspots outside the central zone. There’s also the continuing effect of the centre enlarging into parts of Inner London at its fringes. Big redevelopment schemes like Nine Elms, Elephant and Castle and Earls Court are all drawing from the neighbouring wellspring of big wealth. That, of course, sums up what is very, very different from the careworn, shrinking London of the punk rock jubilee. Today’s challenge for London is how to make the best of its immense allure and growth. The arguments about that, though, remain in many ways the same as when it was in decline.