Older than most people expect, and entirely comfortable about it. Seven in ten households own their home. The typical resident is in their early fifties, and the twenty-five to forty-four bracket is thin on the ground. Around a quarter of households are one person living on their own. This is not somewhere people pass through on the way to a better-paid version of their life.
At the 2021 census, about 71% of households across the South Brent area owned their home, about 15% rented privately and about 13% rented from a social landlord. Ownership at that level produces a particular kind of street, where people know the history of the house three doors down, and it leaves a rental market small enough that renters wait for something to appear rather than choosing between options.
The median resident is 52. About 18% of people fall in the twenty-five to forty-four range, the stretch of life when most people arrive with a first mortgage and a car seat. That gap does more to shape what the village looks like on a Tuesday morning than any other figure here.
Median household income across the area was modelled at about £55,000 gross, before tax, for the financial year to March 2023. The equivalent figure after tax comes out at about £43,000. Both describe a year that has already finished rather than what anyone is being paid this month, and both cover the wider area rather than any particular lane in it.
Family households are present without running the place. About 16% are couples with children and about 8% are lone-parent households. Those shares come from the census, which is the source for every population figure on this page.
Living alone is the larger story. About 27% of households are a single person, and about 16% are a pensioner living alone, a group that sits inside that first figure rather than alongside it. A village where a quarter of front doors open onto one person is a village with a particular social shape, and it is not the one the countryside-living photography tends to go with.
On qualifications, about 43% of residents hold a degree-level qualification, about 13% hold none at all, and about 2% are in full-time study. The mix is the point rather than either end of it. Those figures rank nobody, and they explain neither what houses cost here nor how the schools perform, however tempting it is to draw the line.
Who lives here lands in the middle of the range: comfortable without being wealthy, rooted without being closed, and noticeably older than the brochures suggest. Arrive in your thirties with a pushchair and you will not be the only one, though you will work out fairly quickly that you are outnumbered.