Blackheath is home to well-educated professionals in their thirties and forties, sharing the area with a large group of social tenants. Half the households own their home and half rent. Most adults have a degree. The typical resident is in their late thirties. It is a mixed place where the money stands out more than the mix does.
At the 2021 census, which is the source for every population figure here, about 50% of Blackheath's households owned their home. About 26% rented privately and about 22% rented from a council or housing association. That is a bigger social-rented share than the Georgian terraces suggest, and it means the heath is shared by a broader range of people than the house prices imply.
The median age is 38, and about 35% of residents are aged 25 to 44. Those are the career-and-young-children years, and they make up the core of the place. Full-time students are only about 2% of residents, so most of the late-night parties here are thrown by people with a mortgage.
The Office for National Statistics modelled gross household income at about £81,000 for the financial year to March 2023. That is income before tax, averaged across the area's neighbourhoods, and it describes a past year more than this one. Households in the large houses near the heath will be well above that figure, and many of the flats behind them well below it.
About 11% of households are headed by a lone parent, a reminder that the comfortable average is made up of many quite different homes.
About 32% of households are one person living alone, and about 11% are a single pensioner living alone, a group counted within that 32%. Couples with dependent children make up about 19%. Single people outnumber families on paper, though the families are easier to spot on Saturday mornings on the grass.
About 56% of adults hold a degree or higher qualification, and about 13% have no formal qualifications. That spread is wide. One street has the people who write the reports, and the next street has the people the reports are about, sharing a high street and a bus stop. With that many graduates and nine pubs, quiz night is taken seriously.
About 86% of residents describe their health as good or very good. Across Greenwich as a whole, the rate of deaths that could have been prevented is similar to England's, and the borough's smoking rate of about 9% is also similar to the national figure. Both are borough figures, so they describe the wider authority more than the streets around the heath.
Blackheath's population is better off and better educated than average, but it is mixed, not exclusive. Owners and social tenants, graduates and people with no qualifications, all live within a short walk of the same common.