Cranbrook is populated almost entirely by people in the busiest stretch of their lives. Six in ten own their homes. Around a third rent. The typical resident is in their early thirties, and pensioners living alone barely register at all. This is a town of first proper houses and second children, and it shows in the parked cars, the trampolines and the volume at four in the afternoon.
On tenure, about 61% own, about 17% rent from a social landlord and about 14% rent privately. The new-estate cliché of wall-to-wall owner-occupiers does not hold here. Renting is a real and substantial part of the town, and social renting is the larger half of it, which is not what most people assume when they see the brickwork.
The age profile is where the place separates itself from the rest of the county. The median age is 32, and about 39% of residents are aged between 25 and 44. That is a working-age town with the school-age population attached, rather than a retirement destination with a school bolted on.
Families dominate the household make-up. About 32% of households are couples with children, and about 12% are lone parent households. Between them that is close to half the town organised around somebody's bedtime.
All the population figures on this page come from the 2021 Census. About 18% of households are single-person, and about 3% are a pensioner living alone, which sits inside that single-person figure rather than alongside it. The people living by themselves here are mostly not old, which is the opposite of the national mental image of a one-person household.
On qualifications, about 36% of residents hold a degree-level qualification, about 9% hold none at all, and about 2% are full-time students. That is a mixed working population rather than a graduate enclave or its opposite, and the mix is the point.
As a population, Cranbrook comes out somewhere in the middle: young, working, family-heavy, and neither struggling nor comfortable enough to be smug about it. The town is still filling in its own demographic outline, and whoever moves in over the next decade gets a real say in what it settles into.