Is Loughborough Too Densely Populated?

Has England’s green and pleasant land all of a sudden become England’s green and overcrowded land?

With the nation’s ever-increasing population and the double whammy that people are now living longer, this means as each year goes by, there is an ever-growing strain on public services and in particular my favourite topic - housing. It’s no wonder some people are saying things are at crisis point when it comes to infrastructure (like roads, schooling etc) and in particular housing.  I hear it all the time, people complaining that Loughborough looks like a building site and, we are packing people in like sardines into our Loughborough homes. Yet I wanted to find out exactly what the truth was.

Starting with the UK as a whole, there are 698 people per square mile whilst in England. There are 1103 people per square mile, and finally in Greater London 14,587 people per square mile. These all sound quite awful numbers, until you drill down and realise a square mile is an awfully big area - there are only 93,600 square miles in the whole of the UK and that includes the wilderness areas of Scotland!

Let’s look at more realistic areas of land - and I want to look at my favourite - the acre. To those born after the mid 1970’s, an acre is roughly half the size of a football pitch or a square roughly 63 metres by 63 metres and there are just less than 2.5 acres in a hectare.

The population of Loughborough is 59,932 and the total area is 3,580 acres, meaning 16.74 people live per acre in Loughborough. So, how does that compare to neighbouring areas and towns?

Location and Postcode	Population	Area in Acres	Population Density - # People per Acre
Loughborough	59,932	3,580	16.74
Ashby-de-la-Zouch	12,370	976	12.67
Hinckley	45,249	3,175	14.25
Melton Mowbray	27,158	1,732	15.68
Tamworth	81,964	5,111	16.04

As you can see, only just under 17 people live per acre in Loughborough, interesting when compared to both Greater London, which has a density of 23.26 people per acre and London’s most crowded suburb, Pimlico, at 92.32 people per acre. Yet even Pimlico is nothing to the Collblanc district in Barcelona, which has 214.8 people living it per acre.

So, is Loughborough over populated? Yes, it seems that way at school time or rush hour when sitting in traffic, that Loughborough is over populated – yet the stats show - we aren’t.

Evidently, we are never going to have an even spread of population as can be seen from the figures in the table, and the remote nature of some parts of the country would not be able to withstand high densities of new people without enormous infrastructure investment.

Yet could we accommodate a much larger population in the UK (and Loughborough) although there would be trade-offs? Look back at the 17th and 18th century where certain sectors of society were warning about population growth. The population of the UK in 1801 was 10.5 million and even with the growth of the population since then, only 1.2% of the UK is currently built on for housing purposes.

The question, it seems to me, is not can we manage but how would a larger Loughborough population change our way of life, both for better and possibly worse?

The planners have a responsibility to ensure Loughborough provides its fair share of new homes to accommodate this population growth in the coming years. The local authority has a responsibility towards adequate provision of the infrastructure of roads, hospitals and schools etc., to match the growth in housing. This is not a political topic and I hope once the ‘B’ word is finally sorted we can get on with addressing the shortage of affordable new homes for future generations.

For more thoughts on the Loughborough Property market please free to call me on 01509 260777 or email me.