English urban policy and the return to the city: A decade of growth, 2001–2011

• Across the globe reurbanization has been a key urban policy.
• Since 2001, English cities have reversed historic trends of population loss.
• Growth was driven by an English urban policy focused on city centre revitalisation.
• Despite this growth, England’s major cities remain highly deprived.
• The legacy of English urban policy is more symbolic than structural.

In recent years, English cities have witnessed a reversal of their historically declining populations, particularly in central areas. Decades of loss have been replaced by a return to the city which is, in part, a result of urban policies developed by the New Labour government of 1997 to 2010. With the availability of small area data from the 2011 Census it is now possible to examine the spatial distribution of this ‘reurbanization’ and the extent to which it was driven by the phenomenon of city centre living. This paper takes as its starting point the historic Urban White Paper of 2000 and uses new population data for a group of key English cities in order to understand the scale of this return to the city. The results show that there was a population explosion within the central parts of some English cities, most notably in Manchester. The question of whether this population growth represents a successful policy outcome is addressed in the paper’s final section.