The paper estimates a household's demand function for housing using household data. Esti- mates of the price and (current) income elasticities are robust at about -0 4 and 0 5 respec- tively. Independent of price and income effects, there is a strong age pattern to household demand. In conjunction with the age profile of household formation, this pattern implies that changes in the age distribution of the population have important effects on aggregate housing demand, although economic growth dominates in determining its rate of growth. During the 1980s there was a dramatic boom in British house prices, followed by large declines in the early 1990s. While financial deregulation and rapid growth in real incomes for people in non-manual occupations contributed to the rise in housing demand and prices, changes in the population's age distribu- tion also played a role (Ermisch 1990). In particular, the number of people in the prime ages for first house purchase increased as a consequence of the baby boom of the 1960s. The fall in birth rates during the 1970s and continued low fertility during the 1980s entail smaller numbers in these prime ages and an ageing of the population more generally. What effect will these changes in the age distribution of the population in Britain have on housing demand and house prices? It may be possible to use aggregate data to answer this question, (e.g. in Fair and Dominguez 1991), but, as recently stressed by Stoker (1993), the most informative assessments of such distributional effects on demand come from studying individual-level cross-section or panel data. A recent study in this vein, by Mankiw and Weil (1989), of the US housing market experience has attracted a great deal of attention because it suggests that house prices are going to fall dramatically in the coming years because of the ageing of the population. While their study estimates an age pattern of housing demand from micro data, they admit it is a biased estimate, and their conclusions concerning the impact of age distribution on house prices are based on a simple, aggregate time-series equation, which omits income and other housing demand and sup- ply shifters. This paper takes a microeconometric approach. It estimates a demand func- tion for housing in Britain, and then examines the implications of prospective changes in the age distribution for housing demand. An important by-product in estimating the demand function is an estimate of the price elasticity of housing demand. Despite the importance of this parameter in assessing the impact of policy changes, estimates of it for Britain are few, and existing ones are questionable, because of the absence of appropriate data for its estimation.