Owners, and they are staying. Seven in ten households own the home they live in. The typical resident is comfortably into their fifties. A third of households are a single person. This is not a town in transition, it is a town that arrived at its answer some time ago and has been quietly declining to revisit it.
On tenure, the 2021 Census puts owner-occupation at about 72%, with roughly 14% renting privately and around 13% in social housing. That is a heavily owned town by any measure, and it explains a good deal about how slowly things change here. Places where three-quarters of people own tend to move at the speed of the people already in them, not the speed of the people trying to get in.
The age profile is the headline fact and nobody should pretend otherwise. The median age is 52. Only about 19% of residents fall in the 25 to 44 band, which is the group that generates most of a town's noise, nightlife and pushchairs. Anyone marketing this place as up-and-coming has either not looked at the age structure or is hoping you will not.
Household income runs to about £51,850, and two qualifications matter. It is a gross figure, before tax, and it is modelled for the financial year to March 2023 rather than describing what anyone earns today. Read it as the shape of local income rather than a current payslip.
Household make-up follows the age profile almost exactly. Around 33% of households are one person, and about 21% are a pensioner living alone, which is a subset of that first figure rather than something to add to it. Couples with children make up roughly 16%, and lone-parent households about 8%. A town where one in five households is a single older person is a town with a particular rhythm to its weekdays, and the shops, the buses and the pace of the high street all reflect it.
On qualifications, about 30% of residents hold a degree-level qualification and roughly 17% have none. Full-time students make up about 2%, which is close to nothing and means there is no student population shaping the rental market or the evening economy. It is a mixed rather than a graduate town, and the absence of a university intake is felt more in what the place does at eleven at night than in anything else.
Health self-reports well. Around 80% of residents describe their health as good or very good, with about 6% reporting it as bad or very bad, which is a solid picture for a population with this age profile. At the wider Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole council level, smoking runs at about 9% of adults, classed as similar to England, and preventable mortality at about 135 per 100,000, also classed as similar. Those two are council-area measures covering Bournemouth and Poole as well, not readings taken in Christchurch.
The population profile sits in the middle: comfortable, settled, well-housed and not especially wealthy once the ownership rate is set against the income figure. The people who live here mostly chose it deliberately, which is a better recommendation than any of the numbers.