Mostly families who own their homes. Seven in ten own. The typical resident is about forty. A quarter of households are couples with children. Chessington is family life with a mortgage attached.
About 73% of Chessington's households own their home, according to the 2021 census, which supplies every population figure on this page. About 15% rent privately and 12% rent from a council or housing association. With nearly three in four owning, private renters are a small minority, so most of the people on any street have to live with each other for years.
The typical resident is 40, and about 28% of people are aged 25 to 44. That is a working-age, school-run population, with few students or retirees setting the tone. Forty is also about the age at which a theme park becomes a place you pay for and stop enjoying yourself, and Chessington has one at the bottom of the road.
The Office for National Statistics modelled typical household income across the area at about £87,000 before tax in the financial year to March 2023. That is a gross figure for a whole household, often with two earners, and it is three years old. After tax, a mortgage on an interwar semi and Kingston's council tax, it pays for a comfortable life and not a lavish one.
Couples with dependent children make up about 24% of households, and lone parents about 12%. Single-person households account for about 24%, and within those about 12% of all households are pensioners living alone, part of the same group and not an extra one. That mix fits a town of three-bedroom houses, where a household is usually a family at some stage of growing up or growing old.
About 34% of residents aged 16 and over hold a degree, about 17% have no qualifications, and only 2% are full-time students. Chessington has a broad spread of working people with every kind of job, and very few students. The students go elsewhere, and the people who come back are usually pushing a buggy.
About 85% of residents describe their health as good or very good, and about 4% as bad or very bad. Across the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames, the rate of deaths from preventable causes is better than the England average, and smoking, at about 8% of adults, is similar to England. Both are borough-wide figures and take in far more than Chessington. Only 56 people live in communal settings such as care homes, too few to shift any of the shares above.
Chessington's residents are a strength: comfortable working families who own their homes, mostly in good health, with a lot of the town's life organised around the children.