The Northern Agenda: What the census tells us about our divided North

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BY ROB PARSONS - JUNE 29TH 2022

A little test of Northern Agenda readers' observational skills before we crack on with the serious business of today's newsletter. Can you work out what's missing from this BBC weather map and why it's enraged a councillor in one part of the North? Full details in Northern Stories at the bottom of this email...

Some 24 million of us around the country filled in the questionnaires last spring - and yesterday the results of the census were revealed in all their nerdy, technicolour glory.

The figures offer a fascinating insight into how the North's population is changing and the challenges those changes might bring to the region's political leaders as our towns and cities go in very different directions.

While the population of England and Wales increased by 6.3% to 59.6 million in the last decade, the North's grew much less quickly with the North East's increasing just 1.9% in the same period.

But a number of areas saw their populations increase markedly, such as Salford, the home of MediaCity, but perhaps more surprisingly Selby in North Yorkshire and Chorley in Lancashire.

But in many parts of the region the picture was quite different. There are only a dozen areas outside London where population actually fell in the last ten years and more than half of those are in the North.

The trend was most pronounced in more rural parts of the region, with Copeland and Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria and Richmondshire in North Yorkshire seeing the