Chislehurst is home to people who have finished climbing the housing ladder. About three in four households own their home. The typical resident is in their early forties. Nearly half have a degree. Most of them got here by selling somewhere smaller first.
At the 2021 census, which is the source of every population figure here, about 77% of Chislehurst's 8,239 households owned their homes. Around 15% rented privately and 7% rented from a council or housing association. Almost everyone here owns, and the renters tend to be saving to join them.
The median age is 43, and about 25% of residents are aged 25 to 44, the age when people usually buy their first home and have children. The people buying their first home in their late twenties mostly do it somewhere cheaper and arrive here a few years later.
The Office for National Statistics models typical gross household income at about £84,500 for the financial year to March 2023, before tax and averaged across the area. That's a lot of money in most of the country and a reasonable amount in Chislehurst, where the house on the drive costs most of it.
About 24% of households are couples with dependent children, the group the schools and gardens are built for. Around 26% are one person living alone, and 14% of all households are a pensioner on their own, counted inside that 26%. Lone-parent households make up about 9%. Many of the pensioners living alone are in family houses their children grew up in and have since left.
Around 46% of adults hold a degree-level qualification, about 13% have no formal qualifications and only 1% are full-time students. With no university nearby, there's almost no student population, and the houses aren't divided into shared lets.
About 87% of residents described their health as good or very good at the census. In the London Borough of Bromley as a whole, smoking rates and deaths from preventable causes both compare better than the average for England. Those are borough-wide figures, and they describe Bromley as a whole more than Chislehurst specifically.
Chislehurst is a comfortable, well-qualified and mostly middle-aged place. It suits people who have already moved a few times and don't plan to again.