London’s population is bigger than ever, but it is household size that matters for housing policy

Joe Wright, 14 January 2015

This week London became bigger than it has ever been before. The previous record was held in 1939, when the population peaked at 8.6 million. It is estimated we have surpassed this benchmark by next month’s Greater London Authority estimates.

Coverage of this record high has been somewhat misleading in that it omits the reasons for London’s previous peak. The 1939 high was more a case of redefining the capital’s boundaries than a population boom. As demand for the suburban lifestyle – a semidetached house complete with garden – rose during the era, Londoners began to take over the nearby spacious counties of Essex, Hertfordshire, Kent, Middlesex and Surrey. As the infrastructure of these places improved, with big projects to add houses to the grid and create transport links, the boundaries between London and the surrounding areas blurred. These populations were subsumed into the capital and re-designation ‘Greater London’.  Following this re-designation the number in the capital dipped during the war for understandable reasons. Since, it has been recovering.

The growth in population this time around is predominantly organic – a rising birth rate and falling death rate. There are also shifting dynamics such as the mixture of in-migration – graduates and young people from around the country moving to London to look for work – immigration, and the number of those leaving the capital to account for.

The speed of growth is also important. Since 2001, Greater London has grown by almost a million – an increase of 12 per cent. The extreme effects of this are evident in housing. Though London housed the same number of people in 1939, it has struggled to meet housing demand since the late nineties when the population was much smaller.

This can be explained by the changing nature of London lifestyles. Londoners are living in far smaller households than in 1939 meaning the 8.6 million this time around will not fit into the same housing stock. This is part-reflected in the great number of conversions of those traditional suburban semidetached houses into flats.  While the headline projection figure matters when debating housing, household size is equally if not more important.

However, projections for the capital’s population predict 10 million will be resident here by 2030. Meaning the headline amount of space will eventually need to increase, particularly for the 50,000 extra houses the Mayor’s office predicts will be needed. If the 1930s is particularly relevant for any reason, it is because it gave rise to the capital’s greenbelt (or the ‘Green Noose’, as the Adam Smith Institute describes it in today’s report), an historical event which really matters to today’s housing debate.