Mitcham belongs to people in the middle of their lives and the middle of the housing ladder. About half own, about half rent. The typical resident is in their mid-thirties. One household in five is a couple with children. It is a town of people getting on with it, most of them too busy to say so.
Census 2021 is the source for every population figure here. It found about 48% of Mitcham's households owning their home, with about 27% renting privately and about 24% renting from a council or housing association. Phipps Bridge, Eastfields and Pollards Hill were rebuilt after the war as cheaper housing, and the social-rented share still carries that history street by street. The private landlords hold almost as many homes, so the rented half of town is split roughly evenly between the two.
The median age is 36, and about 33% of residents are between 25 and 44. That puts the town at the age of nursery fees, first mortgages and a lot of flat-pack assembly. The median resident is old enough to have a mortgage and young enough to still be weighing whether to take one on.
Household income in Mitcham was modelled at about £69,400 before tax for the financial year to March 2023, an average across the area's neighbourhoods by the Office for National Statistics. Tax, pension and national insurance all come off before anyone pays the rent, so the money a family actually lives on is a good deal smaller than the headline.
About 24% of households are one person living alone, and about 8% are a pensioner living alone, which is part of that 24% and not on top of it. Couples with children make up about 20% of households and lone parents about 17%. The primary schools are full for a reason, and the queue at the school gate is a fair cross-section of the town.
About 37% of adults hold a degree, while about 20% have no formal qualifications, and only about 3% are full-time students. Both ends of that range live on the same roads, often in the same terrace, and with so few students the town has none of the term-time swings that university towns get.
About 85% of Mitcham's residents describe their health as good or very good. At the scale of Merton as a whole, the borough does better than England on smoking and better than England on deaths judged preventable, figures for the whole council area rather than for this town alone. Elizabethan Londoners came here in plague years for the soothing air, and on the borough's numbers the reputation has held up longer than the lavender did.
Mitcham's residents have less money, fewer degrees and more crowded homes behind them than the more comfortable parts of London, and the page rates that below the middle. On the ground that means a young, working town of families and renters who have put down roots where the money stretches furthest.