Moving south for work in hard times was a defining feature of life in 20th-century Britain. Yet though London’s economy continues to outperform the north’s, the flow has slowed. Research by Anthony Champion of Newcastle University shows that 49% of unskilled workers changed address between 1971 and 1981. Just 36% did between 2001 and 2011. Overall net migration to the south of England from the rest of Britain has barely increased since 2007 (see chart). Most of that rise was driven not by more northerners moving south but by fewer southerners moving north. British society, long among the most dynamic in Europe, appears to be settling down.
 
Several things explain this. In the 1980s people fled cities such as Liverpool because their industries were dying. They eventually expired, while the financial crash of the early 1990s reduced London’s appeal. Today most of Britain’s big cities have mixed economies, so fewer people need to move to find jobs. Americans are also moving less often (though still more than Britons) as the country’s metropolises become more similar.
 
Though home-ownership rates in Britain have been falling lately, a much larger proportion of the population owns now than in the 1970s and 1980s. That freezes people in place, because buying and selling a house is far costlier and more time-consuming than moving from one rented place to another. Moving across the country was easier in the days when mothers were more likely to be housewives. Finally, wider car ownership and better public transport make commuting easier: the biggest drop has been in short moves.
 
But the most pronounced change seems to be cultural. People used to move mostly for work. They now move routinely, but for other reasons. Each year teenagers travel for university, accounting for much of the inflow into cities such as Manchester and Nottingham. In 2012 fully 23% of 19-year-olds moved local authority, against around 4% of the whole population. A similar flow of 21-year-olds goes to London, which sucks in about a third of new graduates. From there, almost every borough has a net outflow of people to the rest of the south of England, as people move out to commuter towns (London’s population grows anyway because of births and foreign immigration).
 
This churn is most powerful in the south-east. In 2012, 3.1% of London’s population moved to other parts of Britain, while 2.5% moved in. Cambridge, Canterbury, Norwich and Oxford were similarly mobile. But in the north-west of England movement was about half as common as in London. The places with the fewest migrants, both in and out, are struggling industrial towns like Barrow-in-Furness, Hartlepool and Sunderland.
 
The main driver of changes in migration in this model is the housing market, not the labour market. Flows into university towns and then south are largely constant. But flows out of London depend on how many people are buying or selling homes. In the mid-2000s migration out of the capital and northwards jumped as people sold up and moved. From the financial crisis until recently, however, Londoners have struggled to get mortgages, leaving many stuck in the capital.
 
Does this matter? The mass migration of the young is not always popular. Jamie Reed, the MP for Copeland, a district in Cumbria, gripes that the best graduates from his constituency rarely move back after finishing university. Yet lack of movement is probably even worse. Alan Manning, an academic at the London School of Economics, suggests low migration makes struggling towns more vulnerable to economic shocks: if they cannot move to work, people who lose their jobs will take much longer to find new ones. Places such as Merthyr Tydfil, a Welsh former steel town, might be better off if people found it easier to up sticks.
As the housing market begins to move again, migration is likely to pick up. In the longer run, falling home-ownership may reduce the barriers to moving. Yet the new pattern is likely to stick. That will increase the importance of universities to cities’ economies: without them, attracting skilled workers will be difficult. It also suggests that international migration will continue to fill the gaps in the south’s booming low-skilled service sector. But perhaps that is no bad thing. Being forced to move by recession was hardly pleasant. In the new model, people spread about the country at their leisure.