Homeowners who arrived, unpacked and stopped looking at property websites. Nine in ten households own their home. The typical resident is closer to fifty than forty. Renters are almost a rounding error. This is a village of people who've already won the housing game and are now mainly guarding the view.
Every population figure on this page comes from the 2021 Census, which counted 857 people in 344 households. About 90% of those households own their home, about 8% rent privately and about 1% rent from a social landlord. In most places, the renters are the people who'll be gone by next summer. Here there are barely enough of them to notice they've left.
The median age is 48, and only about 19% of residents are in the 25 to 44 bracket that does most of the house-buying and child-raising elsewhere. The village skews to the stage of life where the mortgage is shrinking and the garden is getting the attention the career used to get. Young professionals are here, but they're outnumbered by their own parents' generation.
Median household income was modelled at about £63,800 before tax for the financial year to March 2023. That's a gross figure for the wider statistical area, not a payslip, and it describes a few years ago rather than today. It's the income of a household that doesn't check the price of the weekly shop.
Household make-up is a mix of the settled and the still-busy. About 25% of households are couples with dependent children, the families doing the school run from the top of the hill. About 7% are lone parents. About 24% are one-person households. Within that group, about 14% of all households are a pensioner living alone, which is the quiet side of a village where people stay put long after the children have left.
Qualifications sit across the full range. About 33% of residents hold a degree-level qualification, about 13% have no formal qualifications, and about 2% are full-time students. That's the profile of a place where plenty of people did well without a degree and a third did well with one. The students are mostly teenagers still living at home, because nobody chooses a hilltop village without a bus service as a student let.
Seven residents live in communal settings such as care homes rather than private households, which is too few to change any of the shares above.
The people of Blue Bell Hill are comfortable, established and rooted, and the neighbourhood profile is one of the village's stronger points. The trade-off is that they're not moving, so houses rarely come up for sale.