Charlton is mostly young working adults, most of them renting, and the population is sharply divided on qualifications. About six in ten households rent. The typical resident is in their mid-thirties. Nearly half have a degree, and about one in six have no qualifications at all. Two very different neighbourhoods share the same parks, and the one with more money is the smaller of the two.
Every population figure on this page comes from Census 2021. About 40% of Charlton's households own their home, about 21% rent privately and about 38% rent from the council or a housing association. Charlton started as a manor handed down from Sir William Langhorne to the Conyers and then the Maryon-Wilson baronets, and it has got as far as four in ten households owning their own front door.
The typical resident is 35, and about 35% of residents are aged between 25 and 44. That puts Charlton's centre of gravity squarely among people with jobs, young children or both.
The Office for National Statistics models gross household income at about £72,000 a year, before tax, for the financial year to March 2023, averaged across Charlton. An average that size covers a lot of variation, and in a neighbourhood with this mix of owners and social tenants it describes the middle of a wide range more than any typical household.
About 28% of households are one person living alone, and about 8% are a pensioner on their own, a group that sits inside the one-person figure. Couples with dependent children make up about 19% of households and lone parents about 15%. With nearly as many single-parent households as two-parent ones, many Charlton households have one adult handling both the school run and the bills.
About 47% of Charlton's residents hold a degree, about 17% have no formal qualifications, and only about 3% are full-time students. There is no big student population, so the high degree share comes from graduates who stayed or moved in, and they live on the same streets as residents who left school with nothing on paper.
About 84% of residents describe their health as good or very good. Greenwich as a borough has a rate of deaths from preventable causes similar to England's, and its smoking rate, at about 9%, is similar to England's too. Both are borough figures with a national benchmark, and they describe Greenwich as a whole.
Charlton's population profile is below average. It is young and working, with a wide gap in income and qualifications that the averages do not show.