Bourne End is lived in by owners in their late forties and up, mostly well educated and mostly well off. Three in four own their home. The typical resident is nearly fifty. More than four in ten hold a degree. It is a village of people who arrived with equity and have no intention of leaving with less.
All the population figures here come from the 2021 Census, which counted 7,637 residents in 3,290 households. About 75% of households own their home, about 17% rent privately and about 8% rent from a council or housing association. Ownership at that level is a village where the For Sale boards turn up one at a time.
The median age is 48, and about 22% of residents are aged 25 to 44, the years most people spend buying a first home and starting a family. The village is past the nightclub years and well into the residents' association ones, which suits a place where the residents' associations of Bourne End and Wooburn were lobbying to keep Slate Meadow free of housing as long ago as 1997.
The Office for National Statistics models typical household income across the area at about £73,870 a year before tax, for the financial year to March 2023. That is a gross, modelled average for the wider area, three years old by now, and it flatters the take-home figure. It is comfortable money, and it still has to stretch around a house that costs many times more.
Household make-up is mixed. About 29% of households are one person living alone, and about 16% of all households are a single pensioner, part of that same 29%. About 22% are couples with dependent children and about 7% are lone parents. Bourne End holds families and a large number of people living alone in later life, sometimes on the same road.
Qualifications run high. About 43% of residents hold a degree-level qualification, about 12% have no formal qualifications, and about 1% are full-time students. Students are almost absent here, because nobody studying moves to a village this expensive on purpose.
Health is good by its own account. About 87% of residents described their health as good or very good. Across Buckinghamshire as a whole, the county-wide smoking rate, about 8%, and the rate of preventable deaths are both better than the England average, according to the public health figures for the local authority, which cover the whole county and not Bourne End alone.
Only 30 people live in communal settings such as care homes, too few to change how any of the shares above should be read.
Bourne End's population is one of its real strengths: settled owners, high qualifications, good health and comfortable incomes. The catch for a newcomer is that most of them got in some time ago.