Orpington is home mostly to established families and couples who own their houses and intend to stay put. Eight in ten households own their home. The typical resident is in their mid-forties. Household incomes are comfortable before tax. It is a town of people who have already got where they were going.
Every population figure here comes from the 2021 Census unless stated otherwise. Orpington's 21,110 households are 82% owner-occupied, with 11% renting privately and 7% in social housing. Renting is something most people here did before they moved to Orpington.
The median resident is 45, and people aged 25 to 44 make up 23% of the population of about 52,600. The typical resident is old enough to have opinions about the school run and young enough to still be doing it.
The Office for National Statistics models household income across Orpington at about £84,000 a year before tax, for the financial year to March 2023. That is a comfortable figure, though it is three years old, and the mortgages on these houses take a large share of whatever is left after tax.
Couples with dependent children make up 24% of households and lone parents 9%. A quarter of households, 25%, are one person living alone, and pensioners living alone account for 15% of all households within that group. That is the other half of the family-house story: the children leave and the house stays.
About 41% of residents hold a degree-level qualification, 14% have no formal qualifications at all, and full-time students make up 2% of the population. The graduates are mostly here with mortgages, not halls of residence.
At the 2021 Census, 86% of Orpington residents described their health as good or very good. Bromley as a borough does better than the England average on deaths that are considered preventable, and its adult smoking rate of about 7% is also better than the England figure. Those last two are measured across the whole of Bromley.
Orpington's population is well above average on paper: mostly owners, comfortably off, well qualified and in good health, if not a crowd anyone would call young.