The crowds are packing the pavements around Oxford Circus Tube station. On the roads, cars and buses are jammed in a giant gridlock. This is central London – but it’s not the preChristmas rush or the height of the sales. It’s just the start of another working day.

Similar problems afflict many city centres: Birmingham’s New Street, Glasgow’s Sauchiehall Street and Edinburgh’s Princes Street see similar daily throngs. It is something that city dwellers have become accustomed to, but living in British cities used to be a very different experience.

Watching the Christmas reruns of classic London-based films such as The Ipcress File (1965), one is struck not just by the naive plots and the mildness of the violence but also by the emptiness of the city streets, the absence of pedestrians, cars and the way that the characters can park with ease almost anywhere they like.

What has happened since those days? New figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) tell us at least some of the answer. In the 40 years since Michael Caine acted out his classic role, the population of Britain has risen from about 52m to 60m. That increase is not just continuing to rise, it is accelerating – with the ONS predicting that it will reach 65m by 2016 and 85m by 2081.

“There are three main factors at work. People are living longer, fertility is rising and immigration has increased. The past three years have seen net migration at record levels,” says Chris Shaw, the ONS statistician in charge of population projections, adding that his figures are based on assumptions about all three factors that have previously proved too conservative.

The ONS has produced further forecasts based on slightly increased figures. Under this scenario Britain could have 108m people by 2081.

It is England that is bearing the brunt of this huge increase and much of the rise is being felt in the southeast. Some visitors to the capital complained of feeling “suffocated” by the crowds over Christmas, but it is all about to get much worse: London’s current population of about 7.4m will, for example, reach 8.1m by 2016.

England is already one of the most crowded nations in Europe with 390 people per square kilometre, soon to overtake Holland – currently the most crowded – which has 393. By 2031, according to ONS predictions, we will have 464 people per square kilometre.

What does this surging population mean for people? Put simply it means less space – as land gets more costly, homes will keep rising in value. That means they will get smaller.

On the roads and railways the same applies. The roads will get more congested and rush-hour train journeys will offer standing room only to more of us. Some rail companies are already discussing removing seats altogether to fit more people in.

“The government is spending lots of money on housing and on subsidising key workers, which solves the problem temporarily, but in the long term it just draws more people in and makes crowded regions even worse,” says John Stillwell, professor of migration and regional development at Leeds University. “The cost of living space is rising and the roads are simply going to get more congested. There is less space for everyone.”

Sir Crispin Tickell, a patron of the Optimum Population Trust and president of the South East Climate Change Partnership, believes such rapid growth is pushing England, especially London, towards disaster. “We are already short of water, land and other resources,” he says, “It is completely shortsighted to promote policies that boost its population. It will change all the things that make life worth living.”

He would like to see policies to encourage people to settle in other parts of Britain. That, however, is unlikely to happen. When Labour came to power in 1997 it was determined to reverse the north-south divide under which northern areas of Britain were being left behind by the booming southeast.

John Prescott was tasked with ending the spiral of subsidies – ranging from money for railways to a London pay weighting for key workers such as teachers – that was feeding the overdevelopment of the southeast.

Labour quickly realised, however, that such a plan was fraught with political hazards. When it finally came out, Prescott’s Communities Plan delighted developers by paving the way for up to 2m new homes in the southeast – plus a range of transport and other projects.

A senior official explained that the southeast had become a “hot spot” for growth and that the government had decided that its job was “to meet that demand and not to contain it”.

Since then the south has simply surged ahead. The ONS’s last regional population predictions from 2004, now known to be an underestimate, forecast that the combined population of London and the southeast would rise from 15m in 2004 to 18m by 2029.

Others, however, are voting with their feet. Last week Eric King-Turner, aged 102, a second world war veteran, and his 87-year-old wife Doris announced that they were emigrating to New Zealand because England is “too crowded”.

Increasingly, some people are deciding that the only responsible approach is to limit how many children they have. Among them is Glenn Sayers, a cartographer from East Finchley, north London.

Sayers, a supporter of the Optimum Population Trust, said: “My partner and I may have children but no more than two. There are simply too many people and the best thing we can do for the planet is not to reproduce.”

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