Demographics of Sheffield
overview of the demography of Sheffield, England
The latest (2024) population estimate for the City of Sheffield is 582,493 residents. This represents an increase of about 17,000 people since the last census in 2011.
In the 21st century the city has undergone a population growth above that of the national average, and is projected to increase to over 600,000 by 2020. This can largely be attributed to immigration and relatively high birth rates.
Population
People from Sheffield (or 'Sheffielders') are colloquially known to residents of the surrounding towns of Barnsley, Doncaster, Rotherham and Chesterfield as "dee-dars", which derives from the traditional pronunciation of the "th" in the dialectal words "thee" and "thou", still used, especially by older people, in South Yorkshire. Many Yorkshire dialect words and aspects of pronunciation derive from old Norse due to the Viking influence in this region.
As with many British cities, the major period of growth in Sheffield's population occurred during the Industrial Revolution, when the city attracted large numbers of people looking for work in the local industries (particularly the cutlery and steel industries). In 1801 the population of the Parish of Sheffield was 45,755, by 1891 the population of the soon-to-be City of Sheffield (which covered the same area) was 325,547. Through most of the 20th century, despite the decline in manufacturing jobs from the 1970s onwards, the population remained relatively stable at about 515,000. This was due in part to the efforts made by the city to bring in white collar jobs.
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This entry incorporates text from “Demographics of Sheffield” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.