The Ageing of Our Towns

The think-tank the Centre for Towns has published two relevant reports: The Ageing of our Towns and The Coming Crisis – Access to health in our towns.

The Ageing of our towns

To understand the ageing of our towns it is necessary to track the change in age group populations over the last few decades. The Centre first defined the geographical boundaries of each of its places (villages, communities, small, medium, and large towns, and core cities) and then extracted data from the last four censuses (1981, 1991, 2001 and 2011) for populations within those boundaries.

The Coming Crisis – Access to health in our towns.

Centre for Towns has published look at the accessibility of local health services for people in all parts of Britain. If, as we suggest, our towns will get older and older this report describes the implications for the ability of people to get to their GP, pharmacy, dentist and A & E.

How easy is it to access health services, and does it differ depending on where you live? To understand what it means for a place to be left behind, we need to be able to compare and contrast the ability of different places to connect with a range of local services and institutions, the most important of which are health services.