Bovingdon is mostly homeowners in their forties and beyond, comfortably off and in good health, plus the population of a prison. Owners outnumber renters by a wide margin. Families and people living alone are split fairly evenly. Incomes are high. The prison skews some figures, and a buyer reading the census here needs to know which ones.
The 2021 census, the source for every population figure on this page, puts owner-occupiers at about 75% of Bovingdon's households, with about 14% renting privately and about 11% in social housing. A village where most people own and few let tends to keep its residents a long time, so the neighbours at the barbecue this summer will very likely be the same ones in ten summers' time.
The median age is 42, and about 31% of residents are between 25 and 44. Both figures count everyone inside the village boundary, and that boundary includes The Mount Prison, so the age profile is the village's own plus an adult institution's. There is no bump of teenagers and students, and a cluster of people in their late twenties and early thirties who did not come for the primary school.
Household income across the wider area was modelled by the Office for National Statistics at about £69,000 before tax for the financial year to March 2023, averaged over a block of neighbourhoods around the village. That is money enough to carry a large mortgage in this part of Hertfordshire, and the size of the houses suggests plenty of people here are doing exactly that.
The households themselves are a mix of families and people on their own. About 22% are couples with children and about 9% lone parents. About 29% are single people living alone, and of those, about 16% of all households are pensioners living alone, the older owners who stayed in the family house after everyone else left. In a village built for families, nearly as many homes hold one person as hold a couple with children.
On qualifications, about 34% of residents hold a degree, about 14% have no formal qualifications and about 1% are full-time students. Like the age figures, these count the prison's residents along with the village's, so the mix describes everyone inside the boundary and the private households only in part. Nobody moves here for a university: there isn't one, and the student share shows it.
Communal living is the fact that sets Bovingdon apart from its neighbours. Of 5,609 residents, 985 live in communal establishments, most of them in The Mount Prison, built in the 1980s on the site of the old airfield's hangars, and 4,624 in private households. That makes Bovingdon a village with a prison inside its boundary in a statistical sense as well as a physical one. Household figures such as tenure and family make-up describe the 4,624 alone; anything counted per resident, from age to qualifications, includes both. The village people meet in the shop is older, more settled and better qualified than the per-resident averages alone suggest.
Who lives here is one of Bovingdon's real strengths: long-staying owners, comfortable incomes and stable households, once the prison is set to one side.