History
| Historical population | ||
|---|---|---|
| Year | Pop. | ±% |
| 1821 | 2,943 | — |
| 1831 | 2,741 | −6.9% |
| 1841 | 3,116 | +13.7% |
| 1851 | 2,849 | −8.6% |
| 1861 | 2,531 | −11.2% |
| 1871 | 2,560 | +1.1% |
| 1881 | 3,006 | +17.4% |
| 1891 | 3,834 | +27.5% |
| 1901 | 5,903 | +54.0% |
| 1911 | 7,776 | +31.7% |
| 1926 | 13,311 | +71.2% |
| 1937 | 15,769 | +18.5% |
| 1951 | 20,610 | +30.7% |
| 1961 | 23,862 | +15.8% |
| 1966 | 26,921 | +12.8% |
| 1971 | 35,260 | +31.0% |
| 1981 | 46,585 | +32.1% |
| 1991 | 52,437 | +12.6% |
| 2001 | 58,388 | +11.3% |
Bangor has a long and varied history, from the Bronze Age people whose swords were discovered in 1949 or the Viking burial found on Ballyholme beach, to the Victorian pleasure seekers who travelled on the new railway from Belfast to take in the sea air. The town has been the site of a monastery renowned throughout Europe for its learning and scholarship, the victim of violent Viking raids in the 8th and 9th centuries, and the new home of Scottish and English planters during the Plantation of Ulster. The town has prospered as an important port, a centre of cotton production, and a Victorian and Edwardian holiday resort. Today it is a large retail centre and a commuter town for Belfast, though the remnants of the town's varied past still shape its modern form.
Read more about this topic: Bangor, County Down
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.... It is not “history” which uses men as a means of achieving—as if it were an individual person—its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“I believe that history might be, and ought to be, taught in a new fashion so as to make the meaning of it as a process of evolution intelligible to the young.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)