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ANNUL REPORT,
Ending 29th June, 1861.
Gentlemen,
Since the publication of my last quarterly Report, the census of
the United Kingdom has boon taken, and the Registrar-General has published tables of the
population and houses, enumerated in England and Wales, and in the Islands of the British
Seas, on the 8th April, 1861. From this return, it appears that the population of the Whitechapel
District is 78,964, or 795 less than in 1851, when the population was 79,759. The diminution
in the number of residents in this district, which is now recorded to have taken place, has, I
apprehend, occurred principally, if not entirely, within the last three years, as it is only within
that period, that so many of the bouses occupied by the poor have been taken down for the
purpose of providing suitable sites for the erection of extensive warehouses. In my Report lor
the year 1857, 1 estimated the population at 84,000, and I arrived at that result upon the sapposition,
that the same annual increase of 1,1 per cent. which had occurred in the interval
between 1841 and 1850, had continued to that time, and also upon the calculation of the cxcess
of births over deaths which gave nearly the same result.
The excess of registered births over registered deaths in the the ten years 1851-60, xat
3,626, but if the deaths in the London Hospital of the non-residents be deducted from the registered
deaths, the excess of births over deaths will be about 5.200. To this number there must
also be added the births that are not registered, which, in this district, from causes alluded to
in some of my former Reports, are probably very numerous. The registration of births in England
is not, as in Scotland, compulsory, and a birth cannot be registered after the child has
become six months old.