Mostly owner-occupiers in late middle age, on good salaries, with the children either still at home or recently gone. Four in five households own their home. The typical resident is nearer fifty than forty. Household incomes are high. Very few people rent, and a small number live in care homes outside private households altogether.
The 2021 Census, the source for every population figure on this page, found about 80% of households owned their home outright or with a mortgage. Private renting accounted for about 10% and social renting about 8%. A tenancy is the exception in Stoke Mandeville, and a To Let board would stand out on most streets.
The median resident was 48, and people aged 25 to 44 made up about 21% of the population. That is a thinner band of young adults than the house sizes would suggest. The families who bought here in their thirties are now mostly in their fifties, and they haven't moved.
Typical household income was about £74,600 a year before tax in the financial year to March 2023, a figure modelled by the Office for National Statistics and averaged across the wider neighbourhood. That is income, not wealth. A household that bought twenty years ago and a household that bought last spring can earn the same and live very different financial lives on the same street.
Households come in familiar shapes. About 24% are couples with dependent children and about 6% lone parents. Roughly 20% are one person living alone, and within that group about 11% of all households are a single pensioner. Mum, dad and the school run is a minority arrangement here, which surprises people who judge the place by the size of the back gardens.
On qualifications, about 39% of residents aged 16 and over held a degree-level qualification and about 14% had no formal qualifications at all, a fairly broad spread. Full-time students made up about 2%. Teenagers grow up here, leave for university and mostly come back only at Christmas.
About 82% of residents described their health as good or very good, and about 4% as bad or very bad. Buckinghamshire as a whole does better than England on preventable deaths, and its smoking rate, about 8% across the county, is also better than the England figure. Those are council-area comparisons, set against England by the public health statistics, and they describe Buckinghamshire as a whole more than any group of neighbours in the village.
Of about 3,618 residents, 163 lived in communal establishments in 2021 and the rest, about 3,455, in private households. The area has three care homes, which account for much of that group. They push the older end of the age profile up slightly, and they also explain why a handful of residents appear in the census without a front door of their own.
In short, Stoke Mandeville is home to comfortable, owner-occupying families at the older end of family life, plus a few care-home residents. It is a good place to live among neighbours who have stayed put, and a lonely one for anyone hoping to find people of their own age in their twenties.