Goring is lived in by people who reached the top of the property ladder and decided to stay. Most own their homes. The typical resident is in their early fifties. More than half have a degree. It's a village of settled, comfortable adults, and very few people move in or out.
Owning is the norm. At the 2021 census, which is the source for every population figure on this page, about 77% of Goring's 1,587 households owned their home, about 15% rented privately and about 7% rented from a social landlord. For anyone hoping to rent their way into the village first, fifteen in every hundred homes is a short list.
The age profile leans older. The median resident is 52, and people aged 25 to 44 make up about 16% of the population. The age group that elsewhere is buying first homes and filling the pubs on a Friday is thin here, mostly because the homes that group usually buys are thin here too. Goring is where people arrive after the career has settled down, not while it's still getting started.
The money matches. The Office for National Statistics models median household income at about £77,000 a year before tax, for the financial year to March 2023. That's a gross, modelled figure, three years old. Even so, it describes a village where most households aren't anxious about their energy bill.
Households are split between families and people living on their own. About 27% of households are one person living alone, and within that group about 19% of all households are a pensioner living alone. Couples with dependent children make up about 21% of households and lone parents about 5%. The single-pensioner share is part of the living-alone share, not in addition to it. The picture is a mix of family homes and quieter houses where the children have grown up and left, sometimes on the same street.
Qualifications run high. About 56% of adults hold a degree-level qualification, about 9% have no formal qualifications, and full-time students are about 1% of residents. The student share is low because there's nothing here for students, and the pub quiz is harder than it looks. Goring is a village of people who finished their education some time ago and still have the certificates.
About 58 people live in communal settings, such as care homes, rather than private households, out of a population of 3,680. That's too small to change how any of the figures above should be read.
The community is one of Goring's real strengths: settled, well-educated, comfortably off and mostly owning their homes. The catch is that almost nobody who arrives is starting out.