Elm Park is mostly home-owning households in middle age, with families in the semis and a sizeable number of older people living on their own. About three in four own their home. The typical resident is in their early forties. Most people have a qualification of some kind and are in good health. It is ninety years old as an estate and still lived in by the kind of household it was built for.
Elm Park has 39,605 residents in 15,799 households, and owning is the norm: about 77% of households own their home, about 14% rent privately and about 9% rent from a social landlord. The developer built the estate for private sale in the 1930s and the social housing came after the war, and almost a century on the owners are still the clear majority.
The median resident is 43, and about 26% of people are between 25 and 44. That is a population with careers and mortgages well under way, and fewer people just starting out.
The Office for National Statistics models average household income across Elm Park at about £75,000 a year before tax, for the financial year to March 2023. It is an average for the area, modelled at neighbourhood level and three years out of date, so it says more about the estate as a whole than about any one household.
The 2021 census, the source for every population figure on this page, describes the households themselves. About 20% are couples with children and about 11% are lone parents. About 26% are one person living alone, and within that group about 15% of all households are a pensioner on their own. Families fill the semis, and widows and widowers living alone fill a fair few of the rest.
About 27% of adults hold a degree and about 21% have no formal qualifications, with full-time students at about 2%. There are a few graduates and a fair number who left school without qualifications, and the student population is almost nil. Conversation over the fence is more likely to be about who did the neighbour's loft than about where anyone went to university.
About 84% of Elm Park residents describe their health as good or very good. Across Havering, the borough these figures belong to, deaths from preventable causes run better than the England rate and smoking is about 8%, similar to England. Those are borough-wide benchmarks for Havering, so they tell you nothing about any one street in Elm Park.
Elm Park is a stable, healthy and mostly home-owning community, at its strongest for families settling down for the long haul. Students and anyone looking for a young crowd will find it hard going.