Wembley is home to a young, working population, split almost down the middle between owners and renters, and short of room. About half rent. The typical resident is in their mid-thirties. One household in five is a couple raising children. Nearly a quarter are short of at least one bedroom, which makes this a district where the space runs out well before the people do.
Tenure is close to an even split. The 2021 Census, the source for every population figure here, found about 47% of Wembley's households owning their home and about 37% renting privately, with another 14% in social housing. Private landlords house more than a third of the district, and with Brent's interwar semis divided and redivided over the years, a fair share of Wembley's rent is paid on rooms that were built as somebody's dining room.
The age profile is young and working. The median resident is 36, and about 33% of residents are aged 25 to 44, the years of first jobs, first mortgages and first children. Wembley is where people come to do the hard middle part of their lives, and quite a lot of them are doing it at once.
Household income, as modelled by the Office for National Statistics, came to about £65,900 for the financial year to March 2023, before tax and averaged across the area. That figure is three years old and gross, and for a household with two earners and a London rent to pay, the gap between gross and what lands in the account does a lot of damage.
The households are crowded and mixed. About 24% of households are overcrowded, with fewer bedrooms than the people in them need. Lone parents head about 12% of households.
Beyond that, the make-up leans towards families. Couples with children account for about 20% of households, and people living alone for about another 20%, of whom single pensioners make up about 7% of all households. Wembley has as many couples raising children as it has people living alone, and a share of pensioners on their own that is small for an outer London district built in the interwar years.
Qualifications run in two directions. About 35% of residents aged 16 and over hold a degree, while about 26% have no formal qualifications at all, and full-time students are only about 3% of the population. Wembley is a working district more than a student one, and the people renting here are mostly doing it on a salary.
Health reads well on the census measure. About 86% of Wembley's residents describe their health as good or very good. Brent as a whole has a preventable death rate better than England's, and its smoking rate, about 11% across the borough, is similar to the England figure. Those are borough-level measures set against a national benchmark.
Taken together, Wembley's social profile sits below average, carried down by crowded homes and a large share of residents without qualifications, even as the population stays young, working and healthier than the headlines suggest. It is a busy place to live, and plenty of the people doing it are short of a spare room.