Gants Hill is mostly working families in their thirties, and a sizeable minority of residents rent. Most households own their home. The typical resident is in their mid-thirties. About a quarter of households are couples with children. Roughly two in five adults have a degree. It is a suburb whose residents are in the middle of raising children.
The figures here come from the 2021 Census, which counted 38,531 people. About 57% of households own their home, about 33% rent privately and about 9% rent from the council or a housing association. Owners are the majority, but landlords own a good share of the streets too, and a buyer here is likely to have tenants on at least one side.
The median age is 36, and about 32% of residents are aged 25 to 44. Those are the years for a first mortgage, a second child and a commute. Gants Hill has more people at that stage of life than at any other.
The Office for National Statistics' modelled estimate puts average household income here at about £74,000 a year before tax in the financial year to March 2023. That is a gross figure for whole households, three years old, and it usually means two salaries. Take-home pay is smaller.
Couples with dependent children make up about 26% of households, which puts a quarter of homes on the school run every morning. Lone-parent households make up about 11%.
About 20% of households are one person living alone, and about 8% of all households are a pensioner living alone, a group included within the one-person figure. There are fewer people living alone here than in a city centre, and fewer retired households than on a quiet edge of town. Most homes have more than one person in them, and many have children.
About 44% of adults hold a degree-level qualification, about 17% have no qualifications at all, and about 3% of residents are full-time students. There is no university here, so the morning trains carry commuters and schoolchildren and almost no students. The spread between the degree holders and those with no qualifications is wide, and the census does not split it by street.
About 85% of residents describe their health as good or very good, and about 4% as bad or very bad. Across the London Borough of Redbridge, the rate of deaths from preventable causes is better than the England average, and the share of adults who smoke is similar to it. Both figures cover the whole borough and are measured against the national benchmark. They describe the borough, not the people of Gants Hill in particular.
On who lives here, Gants Hill comes out middling: working families, neither wealthy nor struggling, most of them busy with jobs and children.