Whitton is mostly families who own their homes and plan to stay in them. About seven in ten own. The typical resident is in their early forties. Half the adults have a degree. These are people who've already done the reading, the mortgage and the school applications.
The 2021 Census, the source for every population figure on this page, found about 71% of Whitton's households owned their home. About 19% rented privately and about 9% rented from the council or a housing association. With owners at that level, the people who buy here mostly stay, and the For Sale signs are rare.
The median resident is 42, and about 26% of people are aged 25 to 44. That's old enough to have a mortgage and young enough to still be paying it off. Whitton is a place for the middle of life, after the flat-share years and before downsizing.
The Office for National Statistics modelled gross household income, before tax, at about £97,000 for the financial year to March 2023, averaged across Whitton's neighbourhoods. That's a comfortable figure on paper, and gross figures only ever exist on paper. The amount left after tax and the mortgage is smaller, and it's the one that pays for the extension.
Families with children are the backbone of the place. About 27% of households are couples with children, and about 10% are lone parents with children.
Living alone is nearly as common. About 25% of households are one person, and that includes the roughly 12% who are pensioners living alone. Those two groups overlap, so they shouldn't be added together. A suburb built for young families now holds both the families and the people who raised the last lot.
About 52% of adults in Whitton hold a degree, about 12% have no qualifications, and about 2% are full-time students. Kneller Hall was bought by the state in 1847 to train teachers, and the education theme has held up well since. There are few students because there's no university here, so the young adults who do live in Whitton are mostly working.
About 88% of residents described their health as good or very good in the Census. The wider picture comes from Richmond upon Thames as a whole, measured against England. The borough's rate of preventable deaths is better than England's, and its smoking rate, at about 9% of adults, is similar to England's. Both are borough figures, so they include the riverside streets as well as Whitton's semis.
Whitton's population is a real strength of the place, mostly owners, well qualified and healthy. It's grown-up, stable and unlikely to change much soon.