Ruislip is a suburb of homeowners in early middle age, mostly comfortable, mostly well. Seven in ten own their home. The typical resident is around 40. Incomes are high and the health is good. These are people who arrived, bought, and decided they were staying.
At the 2021 census, which supplies the population figures on this page, Ruislip had about 56,100 residents in about 21,700 households. About 71% of households own their home, about 19% rent privately and about 9% rent from a social landlord. Most of the street will still be there when the extension is finished.
The typical resident is 40, and about 29% of people are aged 25 to 44. That is old enough to have a mortgage and young enough to still be paying it off, and the school gates fill accordingly.
The Office for National Statistics models typical household income at about £83,700 before tax for the financial year to March 2023, averaged across the area. The modelling smooths out the streets, and pre-tax money from three years ago always looks bigger than this month's payslip.
Families and people living alone take up equal space. About 25% of households are couples with children, and another 25% are one person living alone. Within that solo group, about 12% of all households are a single pensioner. Lone parents head about 11% of households. A Ruislip street has the school run going past the house of someone who did the school run forty years ago.
About 42% of adults hold a degree, about 14% have no qualifications and about 2% are full-time students. Students are rare because Ruislip is where people move after university. Stuart Olof Agrell, the optical mineralogist, was born here, and the poet Peter Levi too, so the place has a record of producing people who look very closely at things.
About 86% of residents describe their health as good or very good. Across Hillingdon as a whole, the borough's preventable mortality rate is better than England's, and the smoking rate, about 11%, is similar to the national figure. Those borough figures cover all of Hillingdon. Ruislip's own self-reported health is the more local measure.
Ruislip's population is one of its strengths: homeowning, well qualified, healthy and comfortably off, with a mix of families and people living alone that keeps the streets lived in all day.