Blackfen is mostly owner-occupiers in early middle age, living in family houses. Four in five own their home. The typical resident is about 41. Students barely register. Most of the street is paying off a mortgage.
At the 2021 census, which supplies every population figure on this page, 81% of Blackfen's households owned their home, outright or with a mortgage. Only 14% rented privately and 5% rented from a council or housing association. Tenants are a small minority here, and the landlords who exist mostly have one property each to worry about.
The median resident is 41, and 26% of people are aged 25 to 44, the years of first mortgages and young children. Blackfen is neither a young first-time buyers' suburb nor a retirement suburb. Most residents are somewhere in the middle of their mortgage term.
The Office for National Statistics models median household income across Blackfen at about £81,000 before tax for the financial year to March 2023, averaged over the area's nine middle-sized statistical areas. Because it is gross, it comes before the mortgage, the childcare and the council tax have taken their share. In a suburb where so many households have two incomes, that is two salaries added together, and neither earner would call it a fortune.
In terms of household make-up, about 25% of households are one person living alone. About 13% of all households are a single pensioner, and those are counted within that 25%. Couples with dependent children make up about 24%, and lone parents about 10%. There are about as many people living alone as there are couples raising children, so the same street has both the school run and the neighbour who watches it go past.
About 30% of residents aged 16 and over hold a degree, and 16% have no formal qualifications. Full-time students are about 2%. The University of Greenwich's Avery Hill Campus is just to the west, and its students mostly live somewhere else.
At the census, 85% 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, Public Health England's successor body records preventable deaths at a rate similar to England's, and smoking, at about 7% of adults, also similar to England. Those are borough figures with a national benchmark, and they do not single out Blackfen.
Blackfen's population is better off than average: owners, earners and families, comfortably placed and in no rush to leave.