Recent changes in the pace of population deconcentration in Britain

"This paper uses the official annual population estimates to examine changes in the scale of urban-rural shift in the distribution of the British population since the 1960s. These reveal that the level of population deconcentration at regional and more local scales stood at its highest at the beginning of the 1970s and that since the mid 1970s the rate of population loss experienced by London and several other large cities has diminished markedly. An analysis of the components of population change reveals that trends in net migration have been primarily responsible, though generally reinforced by trends in natural change rates. It is concluded that...most of [the 1970s] featured the downwave of a longer cycle of decentralisation which had its origins at least as early as the first half of the 1960s."