Despite the bunting and the jubilant crowds it was clear that London in 1948 was a city in decline. By the 1980s she would have lost two million of her inhabitants. London did not return to her 1939 population peak of 8.6 million until the beginning of 2015, by which point 44 per cent of the Londoners would be officially classified as Black or Minority Ethnic, many of them immigrants or the descendants of immigrants. From among them came some of the dancers and musicians who performed in the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics. Many of them were grandchildren of the immigrants of the
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