Graduates, families and a lot of people living alone, in a district that is more mixed than its postcode suggests. Six in ten adults have a degree. More than half of households own their home. About one in six rent from a social landlord. Ham is highly educated whichever way people pay for their housing.
At the 2021 census, which is the source for every population figure here, about 57% of Ham's households owned their home. About 27% rented privately and about 16% rented from a social landlord. Ham has a polo ground and a sixth of its households in social housing, and both share the same TW10 postcode.
The median resident is 42, and about 26% of people are aged 25 to 44. That is a settled, middle-aged profile. Most residents are old enough to have a mortgage and young enough to still be paying it off.
The Office for National Statistics models typical household income across Ham at about £106,000 a year before tax, for the financial year to March 2023. It is a modelled average across the neighbourhoods, so it blends the large houses by the Common with the flats and estates. Gross is the word to remember, since tax and pension come off before the mortgage does.
About 25% of households are couples with children, and about 9% are lone parents. That puts a quarter of homes around the school run, which goes some way to explaining the queues for the better primaries.
About 32% of households are a single person living alone, and about 14% of all households are single pensioners, part of that same group. Nearly a third of the doors in Ham open onto one person, and in close to half of those cases that person is retired. Ham has more people living alone than a district this green and family-friendly might lead you to expect.
About 62% of adults hold a degree-level qualification, and about 10% have no formal qualifications. Full-time students make up about 1% of residents. With no student population to speak of, nothing changes on Ham Parade when term starts.
About 89% of residents describe their health as good or very good, and about 3% as bad or very bad. Across Richmond upon Thames as a whole, preventable deaths run better than the England rate and smoking is similar to the national level, at about 9%. Those two figures describe the whole borough measured against England, so they say nothing in particular about any one street in Ham.
About 177 people live in communal settings such as care homes, out of about 23,800, too few to change any of the shares above.
Ham's population is one of its strengths. It is well educated, generally healthy and comfortably off, with enough social housing and single households mixed in that no one group has the place to itself.