Mostly owners in their forties and beyond who have no plans to leave. Three in four households own their home. The typical resident is in their mid-forties. About one home in seven is a pensioner living alone. The for-sale boards go up less often than the extensions.
Ownership sets the tone. About 75% of households own their home outright or with a mortgage, and only about 9% rent privately, with social renting at about 15%. Private landlords barely have a foothold here, which tells you most people bought, settled and started measuring up the back garden. Every figure on this page comes from the 2021 Census except the income one.
The typical resident is 44, and people aged 25 to 44 make up about 23% of the population. That's a place weighted towards the middle of life and the years after it, not towards first flats and flatmates. The school run and the retirement plan share the same street.
Household income averaged about £55,000 before tax in the financial year to March 2023, as modelled by the Office for National Statistics for the surrounding neighbourhoods. That's gross, a few years old, and averaged across a mix of working couples and retired households, so it describes the area, not any particular front door.
The household mix is broad rather than dominated by one type. About 26% of households are one person living alone, and within that about 15% of all households are a single pensioner. Couples with dependent children make up about 20%, and lone parents about 10%. That's a village where the family with two children and the widower next door have been neighbours for years and will be for a few more.
Qualifications are evenly split at both ends. About 22% of residents hold a degree, and about 22% have no formal qualifications, with most people somewhere in between. Full-time students make up about 2% of the population, which is what you'd expect from a place with no university and a median age in the mid-forties. Nobody here is sharing a kitchen with five strangers and a rota.
Of 6,796 residents, 78 live in communal settings such as care homes rather than private households. That's too few to change how any of the other shares should be read.
Whitfield's population is middling by any measure: settled, middle-aged, neither wealthy nor struggling. It's an ordinary place full of people who chose ordinary on purpose, and it's staying that way because hardly anyone sells.