Owners in their late forties, mostly, and doing fine. Four in five households own their home. Nearly half the adults have a degree. A quarter of households are couples with children. It is a village of people who have stopped climbing and started extending.
The 2021 census, the source for every population figure here, counted 14,073 people in 5,499 households. About 81% of households own their home outright or with a mortgage. About 11% rent privately and about 9% rent from a council or housing association. The landlord class here is mostly whoever owns the house next door to their own.
The median resident is 47. People aged 25 to 44, the usual first-home and young-family years, make up about 20% of the population. The village has its children by forty and its peace and quiet by fifty.
The Office for National Statistics modelled average household income at about £79,500 before tax for the financial year to March 2023, averaged across the village's three middle-sized statistical areas. Three years is a long time in a pay packet, so the figure describes then and gives only a rough idea of now. Gross income also flatters a place where some of the money is pension and some of it was earned long ago in London.
Households split several ways. Couples with dependent children make up about 25% of them and lone parents about 9%. One-person households account for about 24%, and within that, pensioners living alone make up about 15% of all households. The family house with the grown-up children gone is a familiar sight here, and so is the widow in the four-bedroom detached.
About 49% of residents aged 16 and over hold a degree-level qualification, and about 11% have no formal qualifications. Full-time students are about 1%. Most of the graduates were awarded their degrees well before they bought here.
About 87% of residents rated their own health as good or very good at the census, and about 4% as bad or very bad. At the level of Buckinghamshire as a whole, the county's public health figures put smoking at about 8% of adults, better than England, and the rate of preventable deaths is also better than the England benchmark. Those two figures cover the whole county, so they describe the setting this village belongs to, and say nothing about the people on any one road.
About 233 residents live in communal settings such as care homes, a small number against the 13,840 in private households, so it changes none of the shares above.
The village's population is one of its real strengths: settled, healthy, well qualified and comfortably off, with every sign of staying put.