Brimstone wrote:

There's no real need for evidence of that. Doug isn't always wrong, and
he's not wrong on this.

There are several things for which demand has shrunk over the past fifty
or sixty decades, eg:

- rented housing - now nothing more than a significant minority form of
tenure, whereas in (say) 1900, it was by far the dominant form;

- public wash-houses and/or bath-houses (run by local authorities) -
demand for thse has fallen right away with the growth of ownership of
washing machines and the virtual elimination of houses without bathrooms;

- shared lavatories and shared water supplies - still a current
phenomenon within living memory, in "court" type housing (which,
needless to say, had no individual water supplies and certainly no
interior plumbing except for waste water) - use of these has disappeared
completely as far as I am aware (except perhaps in the odd caravan or
similar);

- rented TV and video - the dominant force in the market as recently as
the cusp of the 1970s and 1980s, now a small part of it with famous name
chains retrenching, merging, diversifying and sometimes closing;

- public transport over short and medium distances (with exceptions for
commuting into London) - as access to bicycles, then motor-cycles, then
cars, has risen.

These are long-term effects (albeit some of them having changed over
relatively short periods). There is no reason to suppose that any part
of the population would willingly revert to the previous patterns. And
why should they?