The second world war halted suburban building and for a time reduced the population to conurbations and large cities, but by the end of the war many people had returned to the neighbourhood of their pre-war homes. In 1951 many large cities and towns had larger populations than in 1939, but the populations of others, notably London, were reduced. The decrease in the County of London was about two-thirds of a million^ and in spite of an increase in the population of the outer ring, the population of Greater London in 1951 (8,346,000 to the nearest thousand) was nearly 400,000 less than in 1939. The populations of many urban and rural areas surrounding Greater London have continued to increase very rapidly.
After 1939—and therefore probably at least in part as a result of the war—there was a marked change in the relative rates of growth of rural and urban areas as a whole, and of small, medium-sized and large towns. For the first time in 100 years the population of admmistrative rural areas grew faster than that of urban areas, while within urban areas the greatest growth occurred in towns of 40,000 to 75,000 inhabitants, and smaller towns appeared to be increasing almost as fast.
In England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, English is the language predominantly spoken. In Wales, however, Welsh, a form of British Celtic, is the first language of most of the population in some of the central and northern counties and was spoken by about a quarter of the population at the time of the 1951 census. According to the 1951 census of Scotland nearly 100,000 persons, mainly in Ross and Cromarty, Inverness, Argyll, and Lanark, speak the Scottish form of Gaelic, while a few scattered families in Northern Ireland speak the Irish form of Gaelic.[1]
French is the official language of the Channel Islands and dialect French is still spoken there by many people. The Manx and Cornish varieties of Celtic are no longer effectively living languages.
A general summary of trends in social organization, similar in scope to the foregoing summary of population trends, is not practicable. Human relations and behaviour are too complex and too little susceptible to precise statistical treatment, while sources of sociological information are incomplete and not always reliable. It may be useful, however, to review some of the evidence relating to the structure of British households and the extent and use of leisure in Britain in order to provide a background for the consideration of a number of planning problems, particularly in the fields of town-planning, housing and transport.
In Great Britain, as in other countries, most people live as members of private households (usually famihes). Less than 5 per cent of the population were enumerated by the censuses of 1911, 1921, 1931 and 1951 in institutions (hotels, schools, hospitals, etc.).
In 1911 there were about nine million private households[2] in Great Britain. By 1951, according to the Census One Per Cent Sample Tables, there were about 14½ million households, an increase of about 60 per cent. This expansion seems out of proportion to the 19 per cent increase in the total population for the same period. It was in fact comparable with the increase in the population of persons over 24 years old and the slightly larger increase in the number of married persons. In other words, the increasing age of the
