British Population Animation

Background

For much of the last 2,000 years Britain's population has been in the low millions - a result of poor diet, famines, wars, diseases and primitive health care, which have all helped ensure that life for many has been nasty, brutal and short.

Catastrophes such as the Black Death played their part in keeping population figures down, and reduced the number of the British people almost by half in the 1300s.

The Plague returned periodically over the next three centuries, in a series of local and national epidemics, which led to a huge loss of life. For much of this period most of the population lived in the countryside, with London being the only major urban centre.

By the 1550s, the population had nearly recovered to the pre-Black Death level, and there were steady increases during the 1600s and 1700s. However, through the 1800s the population virtually doubled every 50 years. The increase would have been even greater, but many people emigrated in search of a better way of life, to the United States and then in the British Dominions.

In Ireland, in the latter half of the 19th and much of the 20th centuries, the population declined, or remained relatively static. This was due to the potato famine, which killed approximately one million people, and because of high levels of emigration to the New World and to Britain.