Barnehurst is home to settled, middle-aged owner-occupiers with decent incomes and long mortgages. Eight in ten households own. The typical resident is in their early forties. Couples with children and pensioners living alone take up about the same number of front doors. It is the suburb people move to once they have stopped moving around.
At the 2021 Census, which is the source for every population figure on this page, 80% of Barnehurst's households owned their home, outright or with a mortgage. Only 13% rented privately and 7% rented from a council or housing association. With that few rentals, the people next door this year are likely to be the people next door in ten years.
The median resident is 42, and 26% of people are aged 25 to 44. Barnehurst at 42 has finished with the clubs and has not started on the bowls.
The Office for National Statistics modelled typical household income at about £77,600 before tax for the financial year to March 2023. That is a gross figure for the whole household, often two earners, and three years out of date. Take off tax and a mortgage on a semi, and much of it is spoken for.
Of the area's 16,248 households, 23% are couples with dependent children and 11% are lone parents with children. Another 24% are one person living alone, and 14% of all households are pensioners on their own, who are counted inside that 24%. The estate built in 1926 for young families now houses the families' grandparents as well, often in the same semis.
About 30% of adults hold a degree, 18% have no formal qualifications, and 2% are full-time students. That is a working suburb of mixed trades and professions, with a degree common enough to be unremarkable and rare enough that nobody brings it up. The students are mostly teenagers living at home, and Barnehurst has no university to keep them once they leave.
At the 2021 Census, 84% of residents described their health as good or very good, and 4% as bad or very bad. For the London Borough of Bexley as a whole, the death rate from preventable causes is similar to England's, and so is the share of adults who smoke, at about 7%.
Barnehurst is a comfortable, healthy, home-owning suburb, better placed than most on the measures that matter to the people who live in it. The population is settled: owners who bought in, stayed, and will need a skip when they finally move.