Fowey is a town of owners, and most of them are the far side of fifty. Seven in ten households own their home. A third are one person living alone. The twenty-five to forty-four bracket, the one that fills most English towns, is thin here. This is not somewhere people move for work. It is somewhere people move when work has stopped being the organising principle of their life.
On tenure, about 71% of households own, roughly 18% rent privately and about 10% rent socially. That ownership figure is doing a lot of the explaining on this page. A town where seven in ten households own is a town where the population turns over slowly, where neighbours stay neighbours, and where the housing market is a trickle rather than a flow.
The age profile follows from it. The median resident is 55, and only about 16% are aged between 25 and 44. Fowey has not lost its young people so much as never had the jobs to keep the number high, which are different problems with the same result: a town where the average dinner party has strong opinions about tides and none at all about nurseries.
Income sits at about £44,600 for the typical household, gross and before tax, modelled for the financial year to March 2023 rather than for today. After tax the equivalent figure is around £36,300. That is a comfortable enough number for the county and a modest one against local house prices, which is the tension underneath almost everything else in Fowey.
Household make-up is where the town's character really shows. The 2021 census, which is the source for every population figure here, records about 33% of households as one person living alone, and about 19% as pensioners living alone, that second group being a subset of the first rather than an addition to it. Couples with dependent children account for about 14% of households, and lone parents about 8%. One household in five being a pensioner on their own is not a crisis, but it is a fact with consequences for how a town feels in February.
On qualifications, about 37% hold a degree-level qualification and about 13% have none at all, with full-time students making up around 1% of the population. That is a mixed picture rather than a polarised one, and it reflects a town where a maritime working economy and a retired professional one have been sharing the same streets for decades without either winning.
Health self-reports are good: about 80% describe their health as good or very good, and about 6% as bad or very bad. Wider health measures are only published for Cornwall as a whole rather than for Fowey, and on those the council area comes out similar to England on both smoking, at around 12% of adults, and preventable mortality. Similar is the honest word there. Not better, not worse, and nothing in it that belongs at the door of the people who live here.
The population here is unremarkable in the round and unusual in its shape: comfortable rather than wealthy, settled rather than static, and older than nearly everything the town's marketing photographs suggest.