Crowthorne is home to people who have finished climbing the property ladder. Eight in ten households own their home. The typical resident is in their mid-forties. Getting on for half the adults hold a degree. This is where the ladder stops, not where it starts.
The 2021 Census is the source for every population figure here, and the first one settles the tone. About 80% of households own their home, while about 14% rent privately and about 5% rent from a council or housing association. Renting in Crowthorne is something people do on the way to buying in Crowthorne, and there aren't many of them doing it. The landlord classes are thin on the ground, mostly because the houses are too big and too expensive to be worth splitting.
The typical resident is 44. Only about 21% of residents are aged 25 to 44, the years when most people are starting careers and buying first homes. That's the age group priced out of a village of detached houses, and the gap they leave is filled by people a decade or two further along who arrived with equity rather than ambition.
Household income was about £80,000 before tax in the financial year to March 2023, modelled for the area rather than counted from payslips. That's a figure from a few years back, not today's, but it describes a village where two good salaries are the normal arrangement rather than the aspiration.
Households divide in a way that fits the housing. About 25% are couples with dependent children and about 7% are lone-parent families. About 24% of households are one person living alone, and within that about 13% are pensioners living alone, so they're a subset of the single-person figure rather than an addition to it. The family house and the widowed occupant rattling around in it sit side by side on most Crowthorne roads, often a few doors apart.
The qualifications mix leans heavily academic. About 44% of residents hold a degree-level qualification, about 11% have no formal qualifications, and about 2% are full-time students. For a village whose existence dates back to a college opening in 1859, the education theme has held up well.
Health is good. About 88% of residents describe their health as good or very good, and about 3% as bad or very bad. Across the Bracknell Forest local authority as a whole, the preventable mortality rate is better than the England average and smoking is similar to it. Those are council-wide figures benchmarked against England, not Crowthorne's own.
About 1,480 of Crowthorne's roughly 17,000 residents live in communal establishments rather than private households: halls, care homes and similar. The area has 4 care homes. That's a big enough group to nudge the other shares, and it's what a village founded around a college and a hospital looks like on a census form.
Crowthorne's residents are one of its real strengths: settled, well-qualified, comfortably off and healthy, and in no rush to make room for anyone else.