Owners, mostly, and a good number of them have stopped commuting for good. Seven in ten own their homes. The median resident is in their mid fifties. More than a quarter of households are one person living alone. This is not a village that emptied out and got taken over: it is a village that quietly got older, wealthier and harder to buy into, all at once.
On tenure, around 71% of households own their home, about 20% rent privately and roughly 9% rent socially. That ownership share is high, and it is the single most useful fact about the social texture here. Most of the doors you knock on belong to the person answering them.
The age profile follows from that. The median age is about 56, and only around 18% of residents are aged 25 to 44, the years when people usually buy their first house and have small children in it. Flushing is not short of life, but the life is at the older end of the range, and the school-gate cohort is thinner than the housing stock would suggest.
Household income runs to roughly £54,000 a year before tax on the modelled figure for the financial year to March 2023. That is a gross figure describing that year rather than today, and it sits in a village where a typical house costs several times it. Comfortable is not the same as able to buy in, which is why the market here is fed by people arriving with equity rather than by local wages.
The household make-up, from the 2021 census which is the source for every population figure on this page, splits along predictable lines. About 27% of households are a single person living alone, and roughly 14% are a pensioner living alone, that second figure being part of the first rather than an addition to it. Around 12% are couples with dependent children and about 7% are lone-parent households. A village where a quarter of front doors open on one person is a village where the neighbours notice things, which is either reassuring or exhausting depending on temperament.
Qualifications skew high. Around 47% of residents hold a degree-level qualification, about 13% hold none, and full-time students account for under 1% of the population. That combination, a highly qualified population with very few students in it, describes a place people move to after their education rather than during it.
On health, roughly 82% of residents report good or very good health and about 6% report bad or very bad health, both being the village's own figures. Wider health indicators are published at council level rather than locally: preventable mortality across Cornwall is similar to the England average, and the adult smoking rate, at about 12%, is also similar to England. Those are county figures and say nothing specific about this village.
Ten residents live in communal establishments rather than private households, which is small enough that it changes none of the shares above.
Taken together, the social picture is middling rather than remarkable: high ownership, good self-reported health and a well-qualified population, set against an older age profile and an income that would struggle to buy the houses it lives in. Flushing is comfortable, settled, and very hard to join if you are starting from scratch.