Wandsworth Town is full of graduates in their thirties earning good money, and about half of them rent. The typical resident is 34. Two in three hold a degree. Households take home well above what most of the country would call comfortable, before tax. The residents finished studying some time ago and have moved on to paying back the cost of it.
The Census in 2021 recorded about 49% of households owning their home, about 35% renting privately and about 13% renting from a council or housing association. Owners and renters are almost evenly split, which makes this a neighbourhood of people at both ends of the property ladder living on the same streets, often in the same converted houses.
The median resident was 34 at the 2021 Census, and about 45% of residents were aged 25 to 44. Nearly half the district is in the years between a first proper job and the point where the second child forces a move. Teenagers and pensioners are both scarce here.
The Office for National Statistics modelled gross household income at about £89,500, before tax, for the financial year to March 2023, averaged across the area's neighbourhoods. That is a strong figure for a place where so many households are young, and it reflects two-salary households in good jobs. It also tells you less than it seems to, because a gross average looks a lot healthier before rent or a mortgage gets to it.
Every household figure below comes from the 2021 Census. About 28% of households are one person living alone, and about 7% are pensioners living alone, who are counted within that group. Couples with dependent children make up about 20% of households, and lone parents about 8%. Single people living alone outnumber couples with children, and the rest are mostly couples without children and sharers splitting a flat between colleagues or friends.
About 66% of adults hold a degree or higher, about 8% have no formal qualifications, and only about 1% are full-time students. That is a district of graduates who have stopped being students. The universities trained them somewhere else, and the jobs that pay their rent here are mostly reached by train or done from home.
At the 2021 Census about 90% of residents described their health as good or very good. Across Wandsworth as a borough, deaths from preventable causes run better than the England average, and the smoking rate, about 9% of adults, is similar to England's. The borough's record and the neighbourhood's age profile point the same way, toward a place with relatively few health problems.
Wandsworth Town is home to young, well-qualified, well-paid people, mostly early in their careers and with relatively few children yet. For anyone at that stage of life, the neighbours here will be people a lot like themselves.