London’s streets have long been paved with gold. For centuries, the city has been attracting people from far and wide, an ever-growing metropolis that seemed destined to only grow larger. And for a long time (pandemic aside), it did. So that’s why we were shocked to see the BBC headline: “London only English region to see population fall”. It scarcely seemed believable — after all, it’s not like Andy Burnham’s big devolution plan has kicked into gear yet. Yet it was. And what’s more, we found that from mid-2024 to mid-2025, London was the only region of England that saw a population decline, with the city’s total population falling by 0.3%.
The findings are based on the release of ONS mid-year data, which offers local authority level insight to the population as of June 2025 and means that we can drill down a little more into the borough-by-borough details. We found that the local authority that saw the biggest annual population decrease nationally (apart from sparsely populated outlier the Isles of Scilly) was Camden at -1.8%, followed by Westminster and Southwark, both of which saw a -1.5% population change.
There are two main reasons for the population fall. The first is the fact that, while 523,000 people moved to the city (288,500 from abroad, 234,600 from other parts of the UK), a whopping 600,000 left, largely to other parts of the country. The second is that though there have been more births than deaths, the city has nevertheless seen a sustained drop in the birthrate (from 106,000 births to 105,000). But why? And what makes it so different from other years?
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