Southall is home to working-age families in crowded houses on stretched budgets. About half rent. The typical resident is in their late thirties. Few people live alone. The town's 47,668 residents are getting a lot out of homes and incomes that leave very little spare.
Tenure is split close to the middle. At the 2021 census, which is the source for every population figure here, about 47% of Southall's 13,799 households owned their home, about 33% rented privately and about 18% rented from the council or a housing association. Private landlords hold a third of the town, which is a big share for a place where the typical house is a three-bedroom terrace built for an owner.
The median resident is 37, and about 30% of residents are aged 25 to 44, the years of starting work, renting, buying and having children. This is a town of people in the middle of things, with a younger profile than the outer-London suburbs that grew up around it at the same time.
The Office for National Statistics models median household income across Southall at about £60,500 before tax in the financial year to March 2023, and about £44,900 after it. The gap between the two is the part that pays the mortgage on a terrace near half a million pounds, and many households here are pooling more than one wage to get there.
Households are bigger than the London norm. About 22% are overcrowded, and about 5% of residents were unemployed in 2021. The houses are working harder than they were designed to.
The make-up follows. About 21% of households are couples with dependent children and about 14% are lone parents. Only about 19% are one person living alone, and about 8% are a single pensioner living alone, within that figure. Living alone is a minority arrangement in Southall, and most homes have more people in them than bedrooms were drawn for.
Qualifications are split evenly at both ends. About 28% of adults hold a degree and about 28% hold no qualifications at all, and about 3% of residents are full-time students. The town holds both groups in roughly equal numbers on the same streets.
About 82% of Southall residents described their health as good or very good in 2021. The London Borough of Ealing, the area the public health figures cover, has a preventable mortality rate better than England's, and its adult smoking rate, at about 7%, is similar to the England average. These are borough-wide measures and they cover Ealing Broadway and Acton as well as Southall.
Southall's residents are working hard on low margins, with more people per house, less income per person and fewer spare rooms than most of the borough. On how comfortably people live, Southall is near the bottom, and the overcrowding figure is the clearest sign of it.