The UK gained around eight million people between 2001 and 2024. It did not spread them evenly.
| # | Local authority | Nation | 2001 | 2024 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | City of London | England | 7,359 | 15,111 | +105.3% |
| 2 | Tower Hamlets | England | 201,090 | 331,886 | +65.0% |
| 3 | Newham | England | 249,411 | 374,523 | +50.2% |
| 4 | Dartford | England | 85,956 | 125,011 | +45.4% |
| 5 | Milton Keynes | England | 212,707 | 305,884 | +43.8% |
| 6 | South Derbyshire | England | 81,738 | 117,493 | +43.7% |
| 7 | Peterborough | England | 157,439 | 223,655 | +42.1% |
| 8 | Barking and Dagenham | England | 165,654 | 232,747 | +40.5% |
| 9 | Rugby | England | 87,520 | 122,378 | +39.8% |
| 10 | Manchester | England | 422,915 | 589,670 | +39.4% |
| 11 | Slough | England | 120,577 | 167,359 | +38.8% |
| 12 | Hounslow | England | 215,976 | 299,424 | +38.6% |
| 13 | Uttlesford | England | 68,969 | 95,106 | +37.9% |
| 14 | Greenwich | England | 217,460 | 299,528 | +37.7% |
| 15 | Leicester | England | 282,757 | 388,348 | +37.3% |
Figures are ONS mid-year population estimates (with NRS and NISRA for Scotland and Northern Ireland), retrieved via Nomis, 2001–2024, on modern authority boundaries throughout.
The City of London more than doubled
Top of the table by a distance is the City of London, up +105.3%. That sounds dramatic until you see the underlying numbers: it went from 7,359 residents to 15,111.
Doubling a very small number is easy. The square mile is an office district where almost nobody lives, so a few new residential conversions move the percentage enormously. It is the clearest example on this site of why percentage change needs its absolute alongside it.
Tower Hamlets is the real story
Tower Hamlets added 130,796 people, growing 65.0% from a base that was already substantial. That is a genuine transformation, and it is visible from any train into Liverpool Street: Canary Wharf and the surrounding docklands went from derelict to dense within one generation.
Newham, next door, added 125,112. Between them those two boroughs took on more people than live in Newcastle.
Outside London
The pattern beyond the capital is different and more familiar: new towns and commuter belts. Dartford, Milton Keynes and South Derbyshire all grew more than 40%, driven by housebuilding on land that was cheap enough to build on and close enough to somewhere people work.
Milton Keynes is the outlier worth noting, because it grew 40-odd per cent from an already large base, and was granted city status in 2022 partly on the strength of it. It was farmland in 1967.
What this does not show
Local authorities are blunt units. A district can grow 20% while its historic centre empties, if the growth is all in an estate on the edge. Our data cannot see that, and neither can anyone else's without small-area census work.
Growth also says nothing about whether a place is doing well. Coastal towns are growing too, and their problem is not a shortage of people.
The full year-by-year series for every UK authority is on the trends pages, and the other end of this table is the ten places that are shrinking.