Thatcham is lived in by people who have sorted their life into a three-bedroom house and plan to keep it that way. Seven in ten households own their home. The typical resident is in their early forties. Private landlords have barely got a foothold. Settled is the word, and some residents would take that as a compliment.
About 70% of households own their home, and the renters are split almost evenly: about 14% rent privately and about 15% rent from a council or housing association. In a lot of commuter towns the buy-to-let crowd have bought up whole streets. Here they seem to have looked at the semis, looked at the prices and gone back to Reading.
The median resident is 41, and about 26% of people are aged 25 to 44, the years of mortgages, nurseries and arguing about whose turn it is to do the school run. This is not a retirement town and not a student town. It is a town in the middle of its working life, with the tiredness to match.
Household income before tax averaged around £67,000 in the financial year to March 2023, on modelled figures from the Office for National Statistics. That is a gross figure and a few years old, but it describes a town of steady salaries rather than big bonuses: enough for the second car and the annual holiday, not enough to stop anyone checking the energy bill.
All the population figures on this page come from the 2021 Census, which puts about 23% of households as couples with dependent children and about 10% as lone parents. Single-person households make up about 26% of the total, and about 11% of all households are a pensioner living alone, a group that sits inside that single-person share rather than on top of it. The picture is a town of families with a quieter layer of older residents who stayed when the children left and saw no reason to downsize from a house they had paid off.
On qualifications, about 30% of residents hold a degree, about 15% have no formal qualifications and about 2% are in full-time study. The mix is broad, which is what happens when a town grows fast after the war on the back of jobs in warehouses, offices and light industry rather than a university. Nobody here is going to lecture you about their dissertation at a barbecue, which some newcomers find a relief.
About 85% of residents describe their health as good or very good, and about 4% as bad or very bad. Across the West Berkshire council area, the rate of deaths from preventable causes is better than the England average, and smoking, at about 8% of adults, is similar to the England figure. Those are council-wide figures rather than Thatcham's own, and they describe the district as a whole.
Thatcham is a settled, working-age town of homeowners and families, and for buyers after exactly that, its population is one of its better arguments. Anyone expecting a bohemian quarter will not find one, and the residents are not waiting for it to arrive.