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London really grew in the Victorian era. E.g. http://www.demographia.com/dm-lon31.htm http://www.demographia.com/dm-lon31.htm Reading Dickens is one way to get

London really grew in the Victorian era. E.g. http://www.demographia.com/dm-lon31.htm http://www.demographia.com/dm-lon31.htm Reading Dickens is one way to get a feel for this. Many locations in his books are not yet part of the London conurbation. IIRC, one book has a character walking over fields to get to Hammersmith, for example. Going back further there is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Martin-in-the-Fields https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Martin-in-the-Fields

mytailorisrich 3y ago
" Henry VIII rebuilt the church in 1542 ... at this time it was literally "in the fields", occupying an isolated position between the cities of Westminster and London." In the 1550s the country was unrecognisable compared to now. England's total population was about 3 million, now London's population is 9 million (and was 100k then)... Edit: Apparently, wolves in England had just become extinct at the time...
- illwrks 3y ago
  It makes you wonder what it will be like in another few hundred years... When we first moved to London (Zone 2/3) the place we lived in used to be a large apple orchard 100-150 years prior. Where we moved to after was on the grounds of a former nunnery then recouperation hospital. And now the area we're in used to be grazing fields 100 years ago.
  - ido 3y ago
    It will not continue seeing such rapid growth for another few hundred years, world population will plateau by mid century and even the big cities will at some point stop growing.
    - codetrotter 3y ago
      Why?
      - ido 3y ago
        Because birth rates are going down worldwide and at some point the people who wanted to move away from the countryside/poor countries to the big global cities would have already moved (those left behind are older than the ones leaving, so such places will have even lower birth rates). The major global cities will still grow in the next 200 years compared to now, just not as much as they have the previous 200 years.
      - RugnirViking 3y ago
        birth rates in pretty much every developed nation are below replacement level. Some countries are using migration as a sort of band-aid fixed but the worst fears are starting to come true recently. Previously some people had thought or hoped that falling birthrates was/is a natural concequence of becoming rich enough, that as countries develop kids are seen as less of a necessity. But iirc newer data shows falling birthrates even in poorer nations that are stagnant/not developing. They are still well above replacement rate for now but its not a good trend. As for reasons why: nobody has one single cause, but a major one is that current economies mean children are more of a cost than a benefit, and even the most ambitious incentive programs dont make up for the toll of both working a job and taking care of a helpless human. As for why this is a bad thing: There are a lot of inbuilt assumptions to the way society is structured that will begin to break down. Things like: there are more workers than retirees. There are more students than teachers. There are more juior employees than managers. When these kinds of things start to change, we will have to adapt society or things will just fall apart. You're already starting to see previews of this sort of crisis in sectors where few young people join, like becoming merchant ship captains. People having to be called back from retirement, buisnesses failing not from lack of buisness but from lack of employees
        noelwelsh 3y ago
        The human population cannot grow indefinitely without moving to other planets, which is very much infeasible now and probably infeasible into the foreseeable future. Society just has to adapt. The problem I see is our current leaders are only interested in pushing the problem down the road. Declining population (which won't actually decline till 2080-ish IIRC) is not in itself a problem.
    - smugma 3y ago
      Inner London population peaked over 100 years ago.
      - snapplebobapple 3y ago
        You see thus in most of paris as well. Population in 1860 was 4 to 5 times what it is today in the same area.
      - ido 3y ago
        But the "suburbs" (some of them would not be considered suburbs but simply outer parts of the city in a lot of other places in the world) are immensely more populous than 100 years ago.
  - Cullinet 3y ago
    I was shocked the other day by seeing a physical travelcard ticket for Zones 1-9 and having to confirm from a Tube station map that a Zone 9 actually exists. This is four more than I could remember.
    - illwrks 3y ago
      To be fair I didn't know that either... For some reason I thought 7 was the last zone... 13 years here (almost to the day) and I've learned something new !
    - Symbiote 3y ago
      Long ago when I moved to London, it was zones 1-6 then A-D for stations outside Greater London. I think changing A-D to 7, 8 & 9 made it simpler; most people aren't interested in what the local government is when they buy a ticket.
    - darrenf 3y ago
      Zone 5 was split into two back in 1991. Zones beyond 6 have existed since at least the late 90s. My vague recollection is that A-C basically meant "the top end of the Metropolitan line" - certainly how it seemed for me as an SW Londoner. Then at some point the letters were changed to numbers and more stations were brought inside over in Essex, Kent, etc. The Wikipedia page for stations in zones 7-9 has a changelog of sorts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stations_in_London_fare_zones_7%E2%80%939#Changes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stations_in_London_far...
    - mprovost 3y ago
      This post really highlights how much of the development in London is infill into already existing Victorian (or earlier) neighbourhoods and how the city is growing without sprawling outwards. The Victorians built the Metropolitan line out almost all the way to Aylesbury anticipating that the city would follow but it really hasn't. When you take the tube to zone 9 you start to go past horses and cows in fields. There are some really nice walks in the Chiltern hills starting from Chesham and Amersham and you don't feel like you're in London at all. We always wonder if people living there even consider themselves as Londoners.
  - briansm 3y ago
    Atlantis.
- Cullinet 3y ago
  As far as I can recall the population of the UK has hovered around 55 million since the early 80s at least, but this number doesn't seem to make sense to me. I'm reminded of a March 2020 London Evening Standard headline saying that half of the adult population of the UK had been vaccinated and the headline gave 55 million people as the total for that number, which gave me pause for thought.
  - leoedin 3y ago
    The UK population is 67 million today - and has been growing consistently year on year since the early 00's. It did hover around 55-58 million between 1970 and 2000 though.
- flangola7 3y ago
  There are no wolves in England at all?
leoedin 3y ago
The number of houses built in the 1870-1900 period is mad - basically a 3 mile wide ring around London. It's really impressive - especially considering all building materials had to be brought in by railway and then horse and cart.
southernplaces7 3y ago
Interesting to note how London's population peaked in 1939, before falling steadily after that right up to the 1980's, when it finally started to rise again into the present day. A similar thing also happened to New York City in roughly the same time frame.
- dylan604 3y ago
  I mean, nothing really happened shortly after 1939 that made people flee London, right?
  - southernplaces7 3y ago
    Sure, the war, the Blitz, etc. but those weren't the main causes. The regrowth in population took decades even after the war ended. NYC never got bombed, but it went through nearly the same thing during the same time frame.
n1c 3y ago
Wow, 1 million people lived in London in the 1800s! Are there any good books / content on what day to day life was like for people in those times in London specifically?

mytailorisrich 3y ago

" Henry VIII rebuilt the church in 1542 ... at this time it was literally "in the fields", occupying an isolated position between the cities of Westminster and London." In the 1550s the country was unrecognisable compared to now. England's total population was about 3 million, now London's population is 9 million (and was 100k then)... Edit: Apparently, wolves in England had just become extinct at the time...

illwrks 3y ago
It makes you wonder what it will be like in another few hundred years... When we first moved to London (Zone 2/3) the place we lived in used to be a large apple orchard 100-150 years prior. Where we moved to after was on the grounds of a former nunnery then recouperation hospital. And now the area we're in used to be grazing fields 100 years ago.
- ido 3y ago
  It will not continue seeing such rapid growth for another few hundred years, world population will plateau by mid century and even the big cities will at some point stop growing.
  - codetrotter 3y ago
    Why?
    - ido 3y ago
      Because birth rates are going down worldwide and at some point the people who wanted to move away from the countryside/poor countries to the big global cities would have already moved (those left behind are older than the ones leaving, so such places will have even lower birth rates). The major global cities will still grow in the next 200 years compared to now, just not as much as they have the previous 200 years.
    - RugnirViking 3y ago
      birth rates in pretty much every developed nation are below replacement level. Some countries are using migration as a sort of band-aid fixed but the worst fears are starting to come true recently. Previously some people had thought or hoped that falling birthrates was/is a natural concequence of becoming rich enough, that as countries develop kids are seen as less of a necessity. But iirc newer data shows falling birthrates even in poorer nations that are stagnant/not developing. They are still well above replacement rate for now but its not a good trend. As for reasons why: nobody has one single cause, but a major one is that current economies mean children are more of a cost than a benefit, and even the most ambitious incentive programs dont make up for the toll of both working a job and taking care of a helpless human. As for why this is a bad thing: There are a lot of inbuilt assumptions to the way society is structured that will begin to break down. Things like: there are more workers than retirees. There are more students than teachers. There are more juior employees than managers. When these kinds of things start to change, we will have to adapt society or things will just fall apart. You're already starting to see previews of this sort of crisis in sectors where few young people join, like becoming merchant ship captains. People having to be called back from retirement, buisnesses failing not from lack of buisness but from lack of employees
      - noelwelsh 3y ago
        The human population cannot grow indefinitely without moving to other planets, which is very much infeasible now and probably infeasible into the foreseeable future. Society just has to adapt. The problem I see is our current leaders are only interested in pushing the problem down the road. Declining population (which won't actually decline till 2080-ish IIRC) is not in itself a problem.
  - smugma 3y ago
    Inner London population peaked over 100 years ago.
    - snapplebobapple 3y ago
      You see thus in most of paris as well. Population in 1860 was 4 to 5 times what it is today in the same area.
    - ido 3y ago
      But the "suburbs" (some of them would not be considered suburbs but simply outer parts of the city in a lot of other places in the world) are immensely more populous than 100 years ago.
- Cullinet 3y ago
  I was shocked the other day by seeing a physical travelcard ticket for Zones 1-9 and having to confirm from a Tube station map that a Zone 9 actually exists. This is four more than I could remember.
  - illwrks 3y ago
    To be fair I didn't know that either... For some reason I thought 7 was the last zone... 13 years here (almost to the day) and I've learned something new !
  - Symbiote 3y ago
    Long ago when I moved to London, it was zones 1-6 then A-D for stations outside Greater London. I think changing A-D to 7, 8 & 9 made it simpler; most people aren't interested in what the local government is when they buy a ticket.
  - darrenf 3y ago
    Zone 5 was split into two back in 1991. Zones beyond 6 have existed since at least the late 90s. My vague recollection is that A-C basically meant "the top end of the Metropolitan line" - certainly how it seemed for me as an SW Londoner. Then at some point the letters were changed to numbers and more stations were brought inside over in Essex, Kent, etc. The Wikipedia page for stations in zones 7-9 has a changelog of sorts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stations_in_London_fare_zones_7%E2%80%939#Changes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stations_in_London_far...
  - mprovost 3y ago
    This post really highlights how much of the development in London is infill into already existing Victorian (or earlier) neighbourhoods and how the city is growing without sprawling outwards. The Victorians built the Metropolitan line out almost all the way to Aylesbury anticipating that the city would follow but it really hasn't. When you take the tube to zone 9 you start to go past horses and cows in fields. There are some really nice walks in the Chiltern hills starting from Chesham and Amersham and you don't feel like you're in London at all. We always wonder if people living there even consider themselves as Londoners.
- briansm 3y ago
  Atlantis.
Cullinet 3y ago
As far as I can recall the population of the UK has hovered around 55 million since the early 80s at least, but this number doesn't seem to make sense to me. I'm reminded of a March 2020 London Evening Standard headline saying that half of the adult population of the UK had been vaccinated and the headline gave 55 million people as the total for that number, which gave me pause for thought.
- leoedin 3y ago
  The UK population is 67 million today - and has been growing consistently year on year since the early 00's. It did hover around 55-58 million between 1970 and 2000 though.
flangola7 3y ago
There are no wolves in England at all?

leoedin 3y ago

The number of houses built in the 1870-1900 period is mad - basically a 3 mile wide ring around London. It's really impressive - especially considering all building materials had to be brought in by railway and then horse and cart.

southernplaces7 3y ago

Interesting to note how London's population peaked in 1939, before falling steadily after that right up to the 1980's, when it finally started to rise again into the present day. A similar thing also happened to New York City in roughly the same time frame.

dylan604 3y ago
I mean, nothing really happened shortly after 1939 that made people flee London, right?
- southernplaces7 3y ago
  Sure, the war, the Blitz, etc. but those weren't the main causes. The regrowth in population took decades even after the war ended. NYC never got bombed, but it went through nearly the same thing during the same time frame.

n1c 3y ago

Wow, 1 million people lived in London in the 1800s! Are there any good books / content on what day to day life was like for people in those times in London specifically?