Owners, mostly, and they arrived before you did. Almost eight in ten households own their home. The typical resident is past sixty. Around a quarter of all households are a single pensioner living alone. Roughly one resident in eight is between twenty-five and forty-four. This is a town of people who have finished moving house, and the market here is largely a queue for their eventual decisions.
Every population figure here comes from the 2021 Census. On tenure, about 78% of households own their home, about 12% rent privately and about 9% rent socially. That is an ownership share high enough to shape everything else about the place, from how the streets look on a Tuesday afternoon to how rarely a rental listing appears.
The age profile is the town's defining number. The median resident age is 62, and only about 13% of residents fall in the twenty-five to forty-four band that most towns rely on to fill their workplaces and their school gates. The absence of that cohort is not a mystery, and it is not a criticism of anybody who lives here. It is what happens when a small coastal town with good weather and no railway becomes a destination for people at the end of a career rather than the start of one.
On money, modelled gross household income for the area came to about £55,800 before tax for the financial year to March 2023, with the equivalent net figure at about £43,300 after tax. Those describe that year rather than today. They also describe households in which a good share of the income is not a salary, which is the quiet distinction between a well-off town and a high-earning one.
Household make-up follows from the age profile. About 35% of households are one person living alone, and about 26% of all households are a single pensioner, which is a subset of that first figure rather than an addition to it. Couples with children make up about 11% of households, and lone parents about 6%. In practical terms, the family-with-children household is the minority form here, and anyone buying with a pushchair should know that in advance rather than discover it at the school gate.
Qualifications skew toward the top end. About 42% of residents hold a degree-level qualification, about 14% hold none at all, and about 1% are full-time students. That is a well-educated population with a real tail, which is the normal shape for a retirement-weighted coastal town that has spent decades attracting people who finished work in professional jobs somewhere else.
For completeness, 5,161 of the town's 5,237 residents live in private households and 76 live in communal establishments, a small enough number that it does not distort any of the shares above.
The people here are the town's quiet strength: settled, comfortable, overwhelmingly owner-occupied and not going anywhere. What that same profile costs is churn, and a town with barely one resident in eight between twenty-five and forty-four is one where the next generation is a visiting arrangement rather than a resident population.