Great Britain Historical Geographical Information System (GBHGIS)

5. sex-specific net migration gains and losses in south-east england, 1901-11

The prosperity of the south-east is often discussed as a recent development, and even among economic historians it is usually treated as emerging in the inter-war period. This map brings out the prosperity of the outer suburban area before the first world war while rural depopulation continued in the periphery of the region and most of the County of London had already begun to lose population.

The method used to compute these rates is of some novelty. Existing research on migration in our period is of limited value, being based on census data for place of birth and therefore telling us little of which year or even decade people moved in, or at what age. This will be partly remedied by data from trade union membership records of inter-branch transfers (the subject of a separate ESRC-funded project), but the census is capable of yielding migration data for particular decades and age groups, as shown here.

Without deaths and migration, an area would contain the same number of males aged 25-34 in 1911 as it had males aged 15-24 in 1901. Deaths in the age cohort can be estimated very accurately from age- and sex- specific mortality data for the same areas listed in the Registrar GeneralUs Decennial Supplement for 1901-10, so any remaining discrepancy in the sizes of the cohort must result from migration (or enumeration and registration errors): the map plots the estimated net number of migrants as a percentage of the size of the cohort in 1901 for the counties around London.

The fact that most rural areas were lacking in job opportunities is unsurprising, but perhaps the most interesting finding concerns the difference between male and female patterns. Flows of young women would seem to have been heavily influenced by demand for domestic servants, so we find the stockbroker belt of Surrey experiencing substantial out-migration of young men but in-flows of young women. If you zoom in on London using the PDF version of the maps, you will find marked out-migration from most of the Metropolitan Boroughs.

The procedures used here were developed in collaboration with Eilidh Garrett of the ESRC Cambridge Group. They draw on four different tables from three different official reports. We believe this example shows the potential for important new results through combining existing well-known data sets, as well as through the use of novel sources as demonstrated elsewhere in our work.