Owners, mainly, and not many of them young. Two thirds of homes here are owned outright or on a mortgage. The typical resident is nearing fifty. A third of households are one person on their own, and about a sixth of all households is a pensioner living alone. People arrive in this village and then stop moving, which is either the appeal or the warning depending on how old you are.
The tenure split is heavily weighted toward ownership. The 2021 Census, which is the source for the population figures throughout this answer, records about 67% of households owning their home, with roughly 17% renting privately and about 16% renting from a social landlord. That social rented share is unusually present for a village this size, and it is the reason Delabole has a wider spread of household incomes than the postcard version of rural Cornwall implies.
Age is where the profile is most distinctive. The median resident is about 48, and only around 21% of the population falls in the 25 to 44 bracket that most places rely on to fill schools, staff businesses and buy first homes. That is not a retirement village, but it is a village with a thin middle.
Household income sits at roughly £41,000 a year gross, before tax, with about £34,000 of that landing as net income. Both figures are modelled, and both describe the financial year to March 2023 rather than today, which is the caveat everybody quoting them tends to skip. It is a working income in a place where a median house costs a good deal more than that arithmetic would comfortably support.
Household shapes reflect the age profile. Around 34% of households are a single person, about 17% are a pensioner living alone, roughly 17% are a couple with dependent children, and about 9% are lone-parent households. The single-pensioner figure sits inside the single-person one rather than beside it, and together they describe a village where a great many front doors have one person behind them.
On qualifications, the mix is split at both ends. Around 22% of residents hold a degree-level qualification and about 20% hold none at all, with full-time students at roughly 1%. Two groups of similar size at opposite ends of the certificate scale is what a working village looks like before anyone tidies it into a story, and neither number predicts anything about the neighbours.
Health reads as unremarkable, which in this context is the good outcome. About 76% of residents describe their health as good or very good, and roughly 7% as bad or very bad. At the wider Cornwall level, smoking prevalence sits at about 12% and the preventable mortality rate is measured against England as similar, as is smoking. Those last two are council-area figures covering a population far larger than this village, and they say nothing about any individual street.
The people picture is the least flattering part of the case for Delabole. It is settled, older, modestly paid and short on the working-age households that give a village momentum, and anyone buying here for a ready-made social life rather than for the house and the space is likely to find the village politely uninterested in providing one.