The BBC reported on 24th August 2006 that the UK population had exceeded 60 million - see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/5281360.stm .  The report was from the Office Of National Statistics for the year ended 30th June 2005.

I have looked back - in 30 year increments

33,200,000   1876 (includes Ireland)
43,400,000   1906 (includes Ireland)
47,100,000   1936
54,600,000   1966 Railway modernisation as per the Beeching report
58,200,000   1996 Privatisation
70,000,000   2026 (guestimated as of 30th June)

At Sheffield Park on Saturday, I picked up an old timetable for British Rail's Western Region dated 1965, showing services on lines lost over following years.  Some were - dire - in their frequency, not fast, and looking at the "diagrams" there were a lot of trains busy doing nothing for hours on end.   I find myself wondering with a 28% increase in population since then, and modern environmental concerns at the inefficiency of modern cars for transporting people (not only fuel use, but congestion and the need for road and parking capacity) how different things might have been had the population been so much greater in those days.

 

I wonder how many/what % of that number in 1966 were UK born, compared to today's figure.

 
Why's that matter?

 

I think the demographics are as of much interest as the headline numbers,  to help understand how society has changed.

 
For the record, I was born in Devon, of native UK parents (through several generations, on both sides) in 1959.

I don't think I have managed to change society.  Well, not much, anyway. 

CfN. 

 

That makes two of us! (Although in my case 1970!) 

 

Indeed - though we need to be very careful about which demographics we look at and how we see them in balance.

Personal declaration (and extrapolating from that) - I was born in England, my wife was born on a different continent, and I'm not sure that makes any significant difference to us / our travel habits at a "micro" level.   but ...
1. There used to be another travel element - far more longer distance journeys to Lisa's home country.
2. There's also the element that she moved here without an inherited / upbringing in the UK which leads to a lack of immediate local resources onto which to build a new life, and that can effect where people live for many years forward.
3. It requires a bravery (or deparateness in other cases) to move intercontinental, and that in itself brings about a different balance of people.