For 150 years the streets around St Barnabas school in Montpelier, a bohemian neighbourhood in Bristol, rang with the sound of children.
“It was noisy, but it doesn’t matter when it is kids playing,” Rita Lynch, 63, who lives behind the school grounds, said. “These days it is a bit like a ghost town. We miss it.”
The school gates are locked and the windows shuttered with sheets of steel. At the back entrance, two sofas and a coffee table have been dumped. “Save St Barnabas,” reads a faded sign hanging from the fence.
The primary school closed two years ago in the face of huge opposition. The city council said the decision was inevitable: by then it had just 56 pupils, filling a quarter of the 210 places available.
Nationwide, birthrates have crashed. The average number of children each woman has over her lifetime — which the Office for National Statistics calls the “total fertility rate” — fell in 2023 to 1.44 in England and Wales, the lowest on record and down 21 per cent in a decade. Last week the Royal Free Hospital in north London announced the closure of its maternity service, blaming falling demand.
Sarah Harper, professor of gerontology at Oxford University, told the Lords economic affairs committee last week that for the UK to sustain its population without immigration, every mother would need to have at least 2.1 children — which is unlikely.
Bristol has one of the fastest-falling birthrates in England and Wales, down 36 per cent between 2013 and 2023 to 1.14 child per woman. Only 21 per cent of Bristol households have four or more people.
Gentrification, rising house prices and couples delaying starting a family — or deciding not to have children at all — means there are too few children to fill the city’s 131 primary schools. Last year, 4,647 families applied for a primary school place in Bristol, 300 fewer than the year before. In September, 18 per cent fewer children started reception than had started eight years previously.
Less than half a mile from St Barnabas, The Dolphin School — a primary school built in 2012 — is also threatened with closure. On the other side of the city, in Withywood, St Pius X closed in 2021. In the city centre, two schools were merged the same year.
Tamilla Haycock, 28, and her boyfriend Leon James, 24, who are renting a home next door to the St Barnabas site, are yet to decide whether they will have children. “We lost a lot of years to Covid and we want some time back for ourselves,” said Haycock, who commutes to London a few times a week to work for a retail company. She was brought up in Bristol but added: “If we do have children I’m not sure I’d have them here.”
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James, who works in finance, agreed. “Bristol is really expensive. Two or three decades ago, people of our age might have been putting a deposit down on a house but now there’s no chance of that. Being able to afford a house, let alone to have a child as well — it’s just unrealistic.” The average house in Bristol costs about £360,000, which is nearly £70,000 above the English average, according to the Land Registry.
Bristol’s economy almost doubled in size between 2004 and 2021 with a surge of jobs, many of them highly skilled. The city is the country’s strongest economic performer outside London, according to the Centre for Cities think tank. But this has driven up house prices, driving out families.
This has contributed to a stark reversal in demographics. Births in Bristol rose by 12 per cent between 2005 and 2012, reflecting a rise in the national fertility rate. In 2013 the council announced a plan to increase primary school places, including building three schools at a cost of £200 million. This was at a time when there was an influx of people to the city, including from overseas. According to the city council, the percentage of births in Bristol to foreign-born mothers increased from 13 per cent in 2001 to 32 per cent in 2022.
The size and prestige of Bristol’s two universities — the University of Bristol and the University of the West of England — also rose in that time. In 2015 there were 48,000 students in the city, but by 2022 this had risen to 71,000, of which 55 per cent were female. Many stay after graduating. University cities such as Cambridge, Norwich, Exeter, Cardiff and York are among the places with the steepest decline in birthrates in the last decade.
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Six in ten of Bristol’s working-age population have a degree, and highly educated women tend to have children later — and fewer of them. In Bristol, the average age at which mothers gave birth in 2023 was 33. The national average is 31.
As a result, maternity services in Bristol are in far less demand: in 2011-12 nearly 7,000 babies were born in the city; by 2022-23 this had fallen to barely 5,000, according to the Office for National Statistics.
Cossham birth centre, in the east of the city, stopped delivering babies two and a half years ago, supposedly a temporary measure caused by a shortage of midwives. It has never restarted.
A growing number of couples are also deciding not to have children at all.
Fiona Powley, 50, who works as a leadership coach and runs the Bristol Childfree Women group, which has 1,000 members, said: “Bristol is a city where it feels okay for you to live an alternative lifestyle of your choice. It’s somewhere that is maybe a more comfortable place for people to be child-free.”
She said her members decided not to have children for reasons from economic to social to environmental. But Powley, who lives with her partner, who had an adult son when they met, said she had decided to not have children by the age of 12.
She said: “Until I was in my mid-forties I still had people saying to me things like, ‘Don’t worry, hun, it could still happen for you’, and I had to tell them, ‘No, I don’t want children’. I feel I have to explain what I have done with my life instead of having children. The argument is that you can’t be a real woman if you haven’t experienced motherhood.”
Powley acknowledged that the lowering birth rate “creates a fiscal problem for the UK”, adding: “We have still got to afford the benefits burden and the pensions burden. But actually this planet’s overpopulated — the environment is far too strained.”
Regina Beach, 38, a writer and podcast producer who recently moved from Bristol to Newport, said the stigma of not becoming a mother was easing, particularly among younger generations. She and her husband Craig, 42, had always known they did not want children. “I saw what wonderful jobs my grandmother and mum did raising their families, but I also saw that it left very little time and energy to pursue independent passions. It just demands a different set of stability and prioritisation if you’re going to welcome children into your lives.”
Instead she and her husband have travelled widely. “We’ve been everywhere. We’ve cycled from Italy down to Croatia and we’ve been all over the US and Canada. We went to Alaska last year, we went to Mexico earlier this year. It’s just so lovely to be able to see the world and prioritise our hobbies.”
