Tottenham is young, renting and working. Fewer than three in ten households own their home. The typical resident is in their mid-thirties. One household in five is a lone parent with children. Few London districts are under as much pressure, and the households carrying that pressure are mostly working families in rented homes.
At the 2021 Census, about 28% of Tottenham households owned their home. About 32% rented privately and about 37% rented from the council or a housing association, which makes social landlords the biggest single type of landlord in the district. When the Domesday Book counted Tottenham, it found mostly labourers working the lord of the manor's land. The names on the tenancy agreements have changed since then.
The typical resident is about 35, and about 33% of residents are aged 25 to 44. These are people early in their working lives and early in raising families. Tottenham is a place people come to at the start, and the Victoria line is what makes it work for them.
The Office for National Statistics modelled Tottenham's median household income at about £58,700 before tax for the financial year to March 2023. After tax, the same modelling puts it at about £42,900. That figure is three years old and averaged across the area, so it hides wide gaps between streets. The government's deprivation index places Tottenham's neighbourhoods, on average, in the most deprived fifth of England, and they were in about the same place in 2019. In a district where a terraced house sells for over half a million, an income in the fifties does not go far.
At the 2021 Census, about one household in five in Tottenham was overcrowded, the clearest sign of how hard the housing stock is worked. Large families in two-bedroom flats and sharers in converted terraces both show up in that figure. The housing was built for the 1870s, and most of it is still in use.
By household type, about 29% of Tottenham's households are one person living alone, about 8% of them pensioners. Couples with children make up about 15% and lone parents about 22%. There are more lone-parent households than couple families with children. That puts a heavy load on the schools, the buses and the parks, and those are the things Tottenham does well.
About 35% of adults hold a degree-level qualification, and about 25% have no formal qualifications at all. Full-time students make up about 4% of residents, so this is not a student district. Graduates who arrived for the Victoria line and long-standing residents who left school early live on the same streets, often in the same terrace.
At the Census, about 82% of Tottenham residents described their health as good or very good, and about 6% as bad or very bad. Across Haringey, the rate of deaths from preventable causes is similar to England's, and so is the smoking rate, at about 19% of adults. Those borough-wide figures put Haringey close to the middle on health, whatever its reputation.
Tottenham is a young, renting, hard-pressed district. Its residents are mostly working families squeezed into homes too small for them, in neighbourhoods among the most deprived in England, and nothing in the figures suggests that has changed recently.