Cheddar is a village of settled, middle-aged homeowners, and the numbers leave little doubt about it. About three-quarters own their homes. The median resident is forty-nine. Only around one in five sits in the prime early-career age band. Roughly six thousand people live here, and most of them arrived, liked it, and stopped looking. This is not a place people pass through on the way to somewhere else.
Ownership is the defining fact. Around three-quarters of households own the roof over their heads, and only about one in seven rent privately, with a smaller slice again in social housing. That is a village of people who bought and stayed rather than a churn of short leases and moving vans. It gives the streets a certain permanence, and it gives the rental market almost nothing to work with.
On age, Cheddar skews mature without quite tipping into a retirement village. The median resident is forty-nine, and the share in the early-career twenty-five to forty-four bracket is modest, around one in five. There are families and there are pensioners, but the demographic centre of gravity is the established middle: people past the flat-share years and well into the mortgage ones.
Money here is comfortable rather than flashy. The typical household brings in about £58,000 a year, which is solidly middle-of-the-road for a rural Somerset village and enough to keep the housing market ticking without the incomes ever looking like a commuter-belt boom. About a third of adults hold a degree, which fits the professional, steady feel of the place. It is well-off enough, not moneyed.
The household make-up follows the same pattern. Close to a third of homes are single-person households, and about one in six is a pensioner living alone, which adds up to a lot of quiet front rooms. Couples with children account for around one in five, and lone-parent families are a small share, under one in ten. The overall texture is stable and low-turnover, the sort of place where a new car on the street gets noticed by teatime.
So who lives in Cheddar? Settled owner-occupiers, weighted to the mature end, on comfortable middling incomes, in a village that scores well above average for the kind of stable, prosperous-enough community people move to and then stay put in. If you want neighbours who will still be there in ten years, this is the crowd you are buying into.