Twyford is home to settled, well-off homeowners in early middle age, and they are not planning to leave. Seven in ten own their home. Half have a degree. Almost everyone reports good health. The average resident here is not waiting to trade up, because this is where they traded up to.
All the population figures below come from the 2021 census, when Twyford had 8,398 residents in 3,557 households. About 73% of households owned their home, outright or with a mortgage. About 19% rented privately and about 8% rented from a council or housing association. Every sale here is from one owner-occupier to the next, so a renter trying to become an owner is up against people who already own.
The median age is about 44. People aged 25 to 44, the usual first-time-buyer years, make up about 25% of residents. That is a village of people who bought a decade or two ago, not one full of people still saving the deposit.
Modelled household income, before tax, averaged about £81,000 in the financial year to March 2023. It is an income for the area as a whole, not a figure for any one household, and it describes that year, not this one. It is enough to explain the cars on the drives and the loft conversions. It does not make Twyford's prices easy for a new buyer on a single salary.
At the census, about 26% of households were couples with dependent children and about 7% were lone parents. About 29% of households were a single person living alone. Within that, about 15% of households were a single pensioner. Those people are part of the 29%, not an extra group. So Twyford holds families with school-age children and a large number of older residents living alone, often in the house where they raised their own children.
About 51% of residents aged 16 and over held a degree-level qualification at the census, about 11% had no qualifications and about 1% were full-time students. The student figure is close to zero because there is no university here and no halls to fill.
About 88% of residents described their health as good or very good at the census. For the Wokingham council area as a whole, rather than Twyford alone, preventable deaths are better than the England average, and smoking, at about 7% of adults, is also better than England. Those figures are borough-wide. Only 36 residents lived in communal settings such as care homes rather than private households, too few to change any of the shares above.
The population is one of the real strengths of living in Twyford: settled, healthy and prosperous. Whether a newcomer can afford to join it is a question about house prices, not about the people.