Mostly settled homeowners in the middle of life. Two in three own their home. The typical resident is in their mid-forties. Nearly four in ten have a degree. Corsham is where people stop browsing the property sites.
Census 2021, the source for every population figure on this page, puts about 67% of Corsham's households as owner-occupiers. About 15% rent privately, and a slightly larger 17% rent from a council or housing association. That's unusual for a town this pretty. The social housing hasn't been squeezed out by the rows of listed frontages, and the town is more mixed than its High Street lets on.
The median age is 45, and people aged 25 to 44 make up about 24% of residents. That's a town with more reading glasses than first mortgages. There are younger people, but they don't set the pace.
Household income was modelled at a median of about £63,500 before tax, for the financial year to March 2023. That's gross household income, often earned by two people, and it describes a couple of years ago rather than this morning's payslip. It's still a comfortable figure, and it helps explain why the shops lean towards things people want rather than things they need.
About 31% of households are one person living alone, and within that group about 16% of all households are pensioners living alone. Couples with children make up about 21% of households and lone parents about 11%. So the household most likely to be next door is a single adult. The family with the scooters on the drive is common, but it isn't the default.
About 38% of residents aged 16 and over hold a degree-level qualification, about 14% have no formal qualifications, and full-time students are about 1%. That's a broad mix. Corsham isn't a university town, and it isn't built around graduates either. It's a place where the person with the doctorate and the person who left school at sixteen drink in the same pubs.
About 83% of residents describe their health as good or very good. At county level, Wiltshire's rate of preventable deaths is better than England's, and its smoking rate is similar to England's. Those are local-authority figures for the whole of Wiltshire, compared against England, not measurements of Corsham itself. Still, a town where most people say they feel well fits easily inside a county that does a bit better than average at keeping people alive.
Only about 110 people live in communal settings such as care homes rather than private households. That's too few to skew any of the shares above, so the figures describe Corsham's ordinary households.
The people are one of Corsham's stronger points. It's a settled, comfortable, mostly home-owning town with enough social housing and enough young families to stop it turning into a retirement village with good broadband.