Hammersmith is mostly young professionals renting flats, with long-standing social tenants alongside them. Two thirds of households rent. The typical resident is in their mid-thirties. Most adults have a degree. Hardly anyone is a student.
There are about 40,300 residents across 17,900 households. Only about 34% of households own their home. About 37% rent privately and 28% from a social landlord, so in many converted houses and mansion blocks the owner is the exception and the landlord lives elsewhere. Ask how many flats in the block are let and who owns the freehold, because that decides who turns up to the residents' meeting and who pays for the roof.
The median age is 35, and about 38% of residents are between 25 and 44. That is the age of the first serious job, the first mortgage application and the first realisation of what a mortgage costs here. Hammersmith is where people spend those years in London, and some of them stay.
The Office for National Statistics models average household income in Hammersmith at about £78,700 a year before tax, for the financial year to March 2023. It is an average across the area's neighbourhoods and covers households sharing a flat as well as couples and families. That pays for good seats at the Lyric. It does not stretch to the terraced house round the corner from it.
Households are small. At the 2021 census, which is the source for every population figure here, about 37% of households were one person living alone, and about 10% were a pensioner living alone, a group already counted inside that 37%. Couples with dependent children made up about 14% of households and lone parents about 10%. Families are present but outnumbered, and the 2021 count has more people living alone than in any other type of household.
About 59% of residents aged 16 and over hold a degree or higher, and about 11% have no formal qualifications. Only about 3% are full-time students, even though Charing Cross Hospital on Fulham Palace Road is a teaching hospital run with Imperial College School of Medicine. The graduates here have already graduated and moved on to paying rent.
About 87% of residents described their health as good or very good at the 2021 census. Across Hammersmith and Fulham as a whole, the smoking rate is about 12% and the preventable death rate is similar to England's on both counts, which puts the borough in line with the country on both measures.
Hammersmith's residents are mostly working-age, well qualified and in good health, the majority renting and a third owning. It is a more prosperous and more transient population than the cost of housing alone would suggest.