What can you find out? The census is a count of all the people
in the United Kingdom on one particular day and is taken every
ten years. However, collecting information about a country's
population is not a new idea. The Egyptians, for example, used
census information to help them build the pyramids and to give
out land following the annual flooding of the Nile. The Domesday
Book of 1086 was an early attempt to collect information about
who held land in England, but it also provided details about the
size of the population. The first government census in Britain
was taken in 1801. It may have been prompted by a book called An
Essay on the Principle of Population, written by Thomas Malthus
in 1798. Malthus wrote that the population was growing so
quickly that the country would soon not be able to feed itself.
It would be important therefore for the government to find out
how many people it did have to feed.There has been a census
every ten years since, apart from in 1941 due to our involvement
in the Second Wo