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:
“Tell me of the height of the mountains of the moon, or of the diameter of space, and I may believe you, but of the secret history of the Almighty, and I shall pronounce thee mad.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)