Homeowners in early middle age, mostly, in a village that sits near the middle on most measures. Two in three own their home. The typical resident is forty. Couples with children and people living alone come in at about the same numbers. It isn't the retirement village the lanes suggest, and it isn't the London overflow the station implies.
Every population figure here comes from the 2021 Census. Marden had 4,359 residents in 1,803 households. About 67% of households own their home, and about 13% rent privately. Social renting accounts for about 15%, more than the private landlords do. That's a mix the village-life brochures rarely mention, and it keeps Marden from being a single-price, single-type place.
The median age is 40, and about 27% of residents are between 25 and 44. For a rural parish that's young, a long way from the retired population people expect from the name and the fruit-show history. The prime working and child-raising years are well represented, which suits a village whose main business is getting children to school and adults back from work.
Modelled household income before tax averaged about £67,500 in the financial year to March 2023. That's a gross figure covering the whole household, before tax and before a mortgage sized for a house in the Weald. It describes a comfortable village on paper, and as ever the paper doesn't show the mortgage.
Households are an even mix. About 24% are one person living alone, and about 12% are a pensioner living alone, which is part of that 24%, not extra to it. Couples with dependent children make up about 23% of households and lone-parent families about 10%. So families and single households split the place roughly evenly, and a quiet street with a trampoline in one garden and a pensioner behind the net curtains next door is about as typical as Marden gets.
About 37% of adults hold a degree-level qualification, about 15% have no formal qualifications, and full-time students make up about 1% of residents. That describes a village where commuters with office jobs live next door to people who made their living on the land and on Pattenden Lane, and neither group has much time for the other's idea of a good weekend. Students hardly register, because there's nowhere here for them to study and nothing to keep them after dark.
Marden's population is middle of the road, in the literal sense. It's neither wealthy nor struggling, neither old nor young, and it's settled enough that buyers who arrive expecting either a retirement village or a commuter enclave will be proved wrong.