Owners, mostly, and owners who unpacked properly. Nearly nine in ten own their home. Renting barely registers. The typical resident is in their mid-forties. Cuxton is where people stop house-hunting and start arguing about hedges.
About 88% of households own their home, and only about 7% rent privately, with about 4% in social housing. That is close to the most owner-occupied a place can get without being a gated development. For anyone looking to rent, the listings are the first obstacle and the waiting is the second. For anyone buying, the neighbours on both sides are almost certainly owners too, with the long view on boundary disputes that comes with it.
The median age is 46, and about 23% of residents are aged 25 to 44. It is a village of people who arrived with toddlers, stayed through the school years, and are now debating whether a loft conversion counts as downsizing.
Typical household income was modelled at about £60,800 a year, gross, before tax, for the financial year to March 2023. That is a comfortable household figure, the kind that pays a mortgage on a semi and keeps a second car on the drive, and it describes an income from a few years back, not this year's payslips.
The census gives the household picture: about 22% of households are couples with dependent children and about 8% are lone-parent families. This is family territory, though not in the pushchair-traffic-jam sense. Plenty of the families here have children who can drive themselves.
All the household figures on this page come from the 2021 Census. About 23% of households are one person living alone, and within that, about 15% of all households are a single pensioner on their own. That last group is part of the first, not an addition to it. Put together with the families, it describes a village where the school-gate crowd and the long-settled retired live on the same close and share the same hedge-height grievances.
About 29% of residents hold a degree-level qualification, about 17% hold no formal qualifications, and about 1% are full-time students. That is a broad mix, with no single type running the place. The students barely exist because nobody at nineteen chooses a village where the pub quiz is the nightlife.
About 84% of residents describe their health as good or very good. Across the Medway local authority as a whole, preventable mortality is worse than the England average, while smoking is similar to England's. Those are council-wide figures with an England benchmark, not Cuxton's own, and they describe the district the village sits inside rather than the people on its streets.
Cuxton is a settled, middling kind of place to meet the neighbours: owner-occupiers on reasonable incomes, a mix of families and the long-retired, and very few people passing through.