Twickenham is home to well-qualified, healthy, mostly middle-aged professionals, and most of them own the house they live in. Six in ten own. Two-thirds have a degree. Nine in ten say their health is good. The town has passed its exams, built its careers and paid down a fair share of its mortgages.
About 30,000 people live in Twickenham, in roughly 12,400 households, and the 2021 census is the source for every population figure here. About 62% of households own their home, outright or with a mortgage, and about 32% rent privately. Horace Walpole rented a cottage at Strawberry Hill in 1747 and later bought it. A third of Twickenham's households are still on the first half of that plan, and most will have to do without the Gothic extension.
The median resident is 40, and 28% of residents are aged 25 to 44. Twickenham isn't young and isn't retired. It is a town in the middle of things, with children at school and a career that still needs commuting to, at least some of the week.
The Office for National Statistics models typical gross household income in Twickenham at about £103,000 a year, before tax, for the financial year to March 2023, averaged across the area's neighbourhoods. That average blends two kinds of earner. The borough's own economy pays noticeably less than the jobs many residents travel out to, so the headline is partly a figure earned somewhere else and spent here.
About 31% of households are one person living alone, and 11% are a single pensioner, a group already counted within that 31%. About 26% are couples with dependent children and 7% are lone parents. Twickenham is mostly families and people on their own, with not much room for anything in between.
About 66% of adults hold a degree or higher qualification and 6% have no formal qualifications. Full-time students make up just 2% of residents. St Mary's University has been in Twickenham since it moved from Hammersmith in 1925, and almost a century later the students are still a rounding error in the census. The university's neighbours did their studying a while ago, and plenty of them have a doctorate to prove it.
About 91% of residents described their health as good or very good at the census, and 2% as bad or very bad. Across the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames as a whole, preventable deaths run better than the England rate and smoking is about the same as in England. Those two are borough figures set against England, so Twickenham shares them with the rest of Richmond upon Thames.
Who lives here is one of Twickenham's real strengths. It is a town of educated, healthy households that mostly own their homes, and it would take a lot of effort to find a gap in that profile.