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There are a lot of pros to living in a big city. Cities are full of culture, they’re often better connected, and they tend to be full of career opportunities.
But city life can also be high octane – fun, yes, but at times pretty stressful too, and that can start to take a toll. That’s why cities tend to be primarily occupied by younger people with boundless energy, while older people often retire to somewhere they can get a bit of peace and quiet.
London used to be exemplary of this trend, but a report from the think tank the Resolution Foundation has found that the average age of Londoners has risen by two years since 2011 – from 33.8 in 2011 to 35.8 in 2023 – the fastest increase of any major city in the UK. Where most large cities like Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol and Cardiff, have seen the median ages of their residents either remain on a par with 14 years ago or, in the case of the latter two, fall, London has just been getting older.
Two years isn’t a lot, but it does match the ageing rate of the nation’s villages, rather than its cities. So why are there fewer young people in London than there used to be? Well, there’s a couple of factors that the foundation reckons are at play here.
Firstly, people just aren’t having enough babies. Back in the golden noughties, 16 children were born for every 1,000 people in the capital, but these days it’s closer to 14 in 1000. Again, that doesn’t sound like a lot, but it adds up in a town with a population of nearly nine million.
On top of that, when people do decide to settle down and pop out a kid or two, they tend to flee the smog, bustle and stress of the city for tranquil towns and suburbs, taking away young families which would do a lot to lower the average age.
There’s also the fact that people who migrate internally – that is from somewhere else in the UK – to the capital, tend to do so later on than they do in other cities, with the median ‘in-migrant’ moving to London at 29.2 instead of the 26.4 national average across core cities.
35 is, despite what small children or Hollywood might think, young, so it’s not like London’s about to become a massive retirement village. Still, if you feel passionately about keeping city living a young man’s game, it’s pretty clear what you need to do: have as many kids as possible, and have them within these borders.
‘A bucket list tick for twenty-somethings’: is London at risk of becoming ‘just a phase’?
Meet the Londoners who refuse to age gracefully.
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