Barking is young, working and mostly renting. Six in ten households rent. The typical resident is in their early thirties. One household in four is a couple with children. The owner-occupier, who sets the tone in most of outer London, is outnumbered here.
All the figures on this page come from the 2021 Census unless stated otherwise, and it counted 67,720 people in 22,259 households. About 38% of households own their home. About 29% rent privately and about 31% rent from the council or a housing association, so social renters slightly outnumber private ones. On a typical Barking street, the people who own their front doors are in the minority.
The typical Barking resident is 32. The 25 to 44 age group is the biggest, at about 34% of the population, the stage of first flats, first children and first serious conversations with a mortgage adviser. The town is young because people in their late twenties and thirties keep arriving.
The Office for National Statistics models average household income here at about £67,600 before tax for the financial year to March 2023, averaged across Barking's neighbourhoods, or about £47,700 after tax. In most households that is two earners pooling their pay to cover a London rent. It sounds comfortable on paper and feels tighter by the twentieth of the month.
The households are mostly families. About 26% are couples with children and about 17% are lone parents with children, so more than four in ten homes have children in them. About 24% of households are one person living alone, and about 6% of all households are a pensioner living alone, a share that falls within the solo figure.
The qualifications mix covers the full range. About 38% of adults hold a degree or equivalent and about 20% have no formal qualifications, with everyone else somewhere in between. Full-time students are about 4% of residents, so the young people here are mostly working, and there are no student houses to change the character of a street. Both groups live on the same streets, often in the same blocks.
About 86% of Barking's residents describe their health as good or very good. The borough-level picture is less kind. Across Barking and Dagenham, the rate of deaths from preventable causes is worse than the England average, while smoking, at about 15% of adults across the borough, is similar to England. Those borough figures cover Dagenham and Becontree as well as Barking, and they reflect health services and conditions across the whole council area, so they can't be pinned on any one town.
Barking's residents are young, busy and stretched, mostly renting in a town where money and health are harder to come by than in much of London. For a buyer, that means plenty of neighbours your own age who are probably planning their next move too.