Stanmore is home to working families in their middle years, most of whom own their house and plan to stay in it. Six in ten own. The typical resident is about forty. Household incomes are comfortable before tax. The town is also more mixed than its semis suggest, with a quarter renting and a real spread of qualifications.
The 2021 Census, the source for every population figure here, counted 43,799 people in 15,207 households. About 63% of households own their home and about 26% rent privately, with another 10% in social housing. A quarter renting privately is more than the semis would lead you to expect, and much of it is in the flats near the Broadway and the station end of town.
The median resident is 40. About 28% of people are aged 25 to 44, the years of mortgages and school runs. That is a suburb in the middle of its working life, neither young nor retired.
The Office for National Statistics models typical household income at about £75,400 before tax for the financial year to March 2023. That is gross, before tax and anything else comes out, and it is three years old. It still explains how so many of the semis get bought, alongside equity from a previous home.
Families with children are a large part of the picture. About 22% of households are couples with dependent children and about 10% are lone parents. Those shares fill the primaries and keep the mornings busy on the roads up the hill.
Living alone is less common than in most of London. About 23% of households are one person, and about 12% of all households are a pensioner living alone, which is part of that same group. Many of those are people who bought decades ago and stayed on in a family house after the family left.
On qualifications, about 45% of residents aged 16 and over hold a degree and about 18% have none. Full-time students make up only about 2%. Both ends of the education spectrum are well represented here, from the professional on the 7.40 Jubilee line to the long-established resident who never needed a certificate to do well.
About 85% of residents describe their health as good or very good. For Harrow as a whole, the rate of deaths from preventable causes is better than the England average and smoking is similar to it. Stanmore has a hospital on Brockley Hill and a population that, on these figures, uses it less than many.
Stanmore's population is ordinary and comfortable, families in the middle of their working lives with more renters than you would guess. It is middling in the best sense of the word.