West Wickham is home to settled, comfortably-off families and long-term owners, most of them middle-aged and planning to stay. Close to nine in ten households own their home. The typical resident is in their mid-forties. Household incomes are high before tax. Few people move in here, and fewer still leave.
The 2021 census, the source for the population figures on this page, found about 86% of West Wickham's 8,018 households owning their home. About 10% rent privately and about 4% rent from a council or housing association. Renting here is a small corner of the market, and a For Sale sign is about as common as a fox in the garden at noon.
The median age is 46, and about 20% of residents are aged 25 to 44. The people who arrive in West Wickham are mostly families who have already done their twenties somewhere cheaper and louder. The ones who come with children tend to stay until those children have left home.
The Office for National Statistics models typical gross household income here at about £100,000 a year in the financial year to March 2023, before tax and averaged across the area. That is a pre-tax figure from three years ago, but it still explains how a semi at these prices gets bought. A household at that level loses a lot to tax before it pays a mortgage.
Couples with dependent children make up about 26% of households, and lone parents about 8%. That is a sizeable share of school-age families for a suburb with a median age in the mid-forties. Since 2021 more of those children have reached the age where the secondary school run means a bus.
Single-person households make up about 22% of the total. About 15% of all households are a single pensioner living alone, which is part of that 22%, not an addition to it. The inter-war semis were built for families, and plenty of them now hold one person who stayed after the family moved out. That keeps the four-bedroom houses off the market for years, which suits some buyers more than others.
About 39% of residents hold a degree-level qualification, about 12% have no formal qualifications and only about 1% are full-time students. There is no university here, so no student population sets the age profile. Most of the graduates finished their degrees decades ago and somewhere else.
At the 2021 census about 87% of residents described their health as good or very good, and about 3% as bad or very bad. Bromley as a whole does better than England on preventable deaths, and its smoking rate, at about 7% of adults, is also better than England's. Those two are borough figures, and they describe Bromley's population, not West Wickham's front gardens.
West Wickham's residents are one of its real strengths. Homeowners stay put, the families are well-off, and most people are healthy, so the streets stay much the same from one decade to the next.