Mostly young families who own their homes. People in their thirties make up the heart of it. Seven in ten households own. About a third of adults have a degree. Wixams is, by design, the place where people go once the second bedroom is no longer enough.
At the 2021 census, which is the source for every population figure on this page, about 70% of households in the Wixams area owned their home. About 9% rented privately and 15% rented from social landlords. Housing association homes were being let here in the first year of the town, alongside shared ownership, and social tenants still outnumber private ones. Buy-to-let has been slow to arrive.
The typical resident of the area is about 35, and around 33% of people are aged 25 to 44. Those are the years for mortgages, nurseries and the school run, and the place is full of people living them.
The Office for National Statistics models typical household income before tax at about £57,000 for the financial year to March 2023, averaged across the area. That figure is modelled, three years old and gross, and in a town this full of young children much of it goes on nursery fees before it reaches anything else.
Couples with dependent children make up about 29% of households, and lone parents about 11%. Including both, a home in Wixams is about as likely to hold a school bag as a briefcase.
The rest of the household mix is smaller. About 23% of households are one person living alone, and about 9% of all households are a single pensioner, a group already counted inside that 23%. Stewartby and Kempston Hardwick, which fall inside the same figures, have an older history than the new town's estates, and some of the people living alone are there.
About 35% of adults in the area have a degree-level qualification and about 14% have no qualifications. Full-time students are about 2% of residents. That is a working town with a broad spread of qualifications, and one that shows no sign of a university nearby.
At the 2021 census about 87% of residents described their health as good or very good. For Bedford Borough as a whole, the preventable death rate is similar to England's, and so is the smoking rate, at about 12% of adults. Those are borough measures set against England, and nothing in them is specific to Wixams.
Wixams is a middle-of-the-road place when it comes to who lives here: comfortable, working, family-heavy and neither well-off nor struggling. What stands out is how young it is.