Homeowners in their early forties, mostly, who chose a garden over a station. Three in four own their home. The typical resident is 41. Household incomes are comfortable before tax. This is middle life, lived at the scale of a semi.
At the 2021 census, which is the source for every population figure here, 76% of Ashford Common's households owned their home. Private renters made up 15% and social renters 8%. With so few private lets, the rental market is small, and anyone moving in to rent will find the choice at any one time limited.
The median resident is 41, and people aged 25 to 44 make up 28% of the population. That leaves room for both the young families and the people whose children have grown up and stayed on in the box room. The middle years dominate here, and neither end of the age range takes over.
Gross household income in Ashford Common averaged about £65,900 in the financial year to March 2023. That is a modelled figure for the wider neighbourhood, before tax, and a few years old now. No national comparison is given, because a gross household figure without the right benchmark is easy to misread. It is enough to carry a mortgage on a semi, though probably not enough to stop thinking about the repayments.
Lone-parent households make up 9% of the total, a smaller group than most visitors would guess from the number of school-run cars.
Single-person households make up 29%. Pensioners living alone make up 13% of all households, and they are part of that 29%, not extra to it. The rest is mostly couples and families, with and without children at home. Behind a fair share of these front doors, one person is keeping up a whole house and its garden.
Of residents aged 16 and over, 28% hold a degree and fewer than one in five have no formal qualifications. Full-time students make up under 2%. The mix leans towards trades, office jobs and degrees in roughly equal measure, and the students mostly study somewhere else.
Only 37 people live in communal settings such as care homes, too few to change how any of the shares above should be read.
On who lives here, Ashford Common is middling. It is solid, comfortable and middle-aged, and it has no particular extremes either way.