Colnbrook is young, renting and working. More people rent than own. The typical resident is in their late thirties. About one household in five is a couple with children. This is a village of people building careers and households, rather than retiring into them.
The 2021 census found 2,745 people in 1,099 households, and only 42% of those households own their home. Another 34% rent from a private landlord and 22% from a social landlord. Colnbrook was recorded in the Domesday Book, and the owner-occupier is now in the minority there.
The median resident is 37, and about 34% of people are aged 25 to 44, the years of first homes, young children and long commutes. The age profile is weighted towards people with jobs to get to.
The Office for National Statistics models gross household income at about £65,000 for the financial year to March 2023, before tax and averaged across a wider area than the village. On that money a household can manage a Colnbrook flat without much strain. A terraced house is a harder conversation with the bank.
Family life comes in several shapes. Couples with dependent children make up 21% of households and lone parents 13%, so roughly a third of homes have children in them in one arrangement or another.
All the household figures here come from the 2021 census. About 31% of households are one person living alone, and 7% are a pensioner living alone, a group counted inside that larger share. Living alone in Colnbrook is mostly something working-age people do.
Qualifications are spread wide. About 32% of residents hold a degree-level qualification, 19% have no formal qualifications at all and 2% are full-time students. The graduate and the school-leaver share most streets here, and the census counts them both.
At the census, 86% of residents described their health as good or very good, and 4% as bad or very bad. Across the Slough council area as a whole, smoking is lower than the England average, at about 7% of adults, and the rate of deaths from preventable causes is similar to England's. Those are borough figures set against an England benchmark, so they describe Slough more than this village. Still, Slough beats the national average on smoking, which is not a sentence that gets written often.
The people of Colnbrook are a weaker selling point than its schools or its rivers: a young, mostly renting population with fewer owners than most buyers expect and a wide spread of qualifications.