"London's bursting. Or at least that is how it seems. In the first week of February the population of the UK capital breached 8.6m, the peak set in 1939. The milestone was passed amid reports of unscrupulous landlords exploiting a shortage of affordable homes by renting out 'beds in sheds' and underground trains taking the strain of 1.26bn journeys a year — almost 20 per cent more than four years ago.
"And yet a new study by Savills reveals that this population growth is spread far from uniformly across the city. The analysis of census data from 1801 to 2011 reveals that some inner-London boroughs remain well below their population peaks, while outer-London communities have generally recovered and exceeded their numbers or experienced no significant decline at all.
"... For Ian Gordon, a professor at the London School of Economics, land-use economics help explain the vicissitudes of the capital's population. 'It is to do with people becoming more affluent,' he says. 'People who’ve got more income want more space and not more accessibility [to central areas]. They get more concerned about the price of space because, if they are prepared to live further out, they can get a lot more space for their money'."
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