Owners, graduates and people who have stopped moving house. Three in four households own their home. Half the adults hold a degree. The typical resident is in their early forties. Caversham is where Reading renters end up once the deposit finally comes through.
All the population figures here come from the 2021 census. About 74% of households own their home, outright or with a mortgage. Private renters make up about 17% and social renters about 8%. That's an owner-occupier suburb, with enough rented flats near the bridges and the centre to keep it from being entirely settled. The landlords who are here know tenants will pay to live on this side of the river.
The median resident is 42, and about 26% of people are aged 25 to 44. Caversham is not a retirement enclave and not a starter-home estate. It's mostly people in the middle: settled enough to have bought, and young enough to still be paying off the loft conversion.
Modelled gross household income, before tax, averaged about £76,000 across Caversham in the financial year to March 2023. That's a figure from a few years ago, not today's pay packets. Even so, it describes a place where two decent salaries are common and nobody thinks a second car is extravagant.
Household types are evenly split. Couples with dependent children and people living alone each make up about 25% of households. About 13% are pensioners living alone, and they're counted within the single-person figure, not in addition to it. Lone parents head about 9% of households. So families with young children live on the same streets as people whose children left years ago, and on Saturday mornings they share the same patch of pavement.
Education is high. About 50% of residents aged 16 and over hold a degree-level qualification, about 11% have no qualifications and only about 2% are full-time students. That's a small student share for a town with a university, and it shows where Reading's students tend not to live. The graduates here are the ones who stayed, bought a semi and started taking their recycling seriously.
About 87% of residents describe their own health as good or very good. Across the Reading local authority as a whole, deaths from preventable causes are similar to the England rate, and smoking, at about 9% of adults, is also similar to England. Those are borough-wide figures, not Caversham's own, but nothing in them marks the wider area out in either direction.
Caversham has 268 people living in communal settings such as care homes, not private households. That's too few to change how the other figures read.
The people are one of Caversham's real strengths: settled owners with steady incomes who tend to stay once they've arrived. It's a place people buy into and don't leave in a hurry.