Older, settled, and mostly owning the roof they live under. Six in ten households own. The typical resident is past fifty. More than a third of homes contain exactly one person. This is a town of established households rather than new arrivals, and it has stopped pretending otherwise.
Census 2021 puts about 62% of households in owner occupation, about 19% renting privately and about 17% in social housing. Ownership at that level is the quiet reason a place like this changes so slowly. Property moves between people who already live nearby, and the rental market is the small end of a small market.
The median age is 52, and only about 19% of residents fall in the 25 to 44 band. That is the age range which elsewhere fills the rental listings, the nurseries and the evening trade, and here it is the thinnest part of the population.
Household income modelled for the financial year to March 2023 came to about £49,500, measured gross, before anything is deducted. That figure describes that year rather than this one, and it describes a household rather than a person, which is a distinction worth holding onto before anyone judges what the local wage looks like.
Families with children are the minority arrangement here. About 15% of households are a couple with children, and about 9% are a lone parent with children.
The same census supplies every population figure on this page, so one date covers all of it. About 36% of households are one person living alone, and about 21% are a pensioner living alone, that second number sitting inside the first rather than adding to it. A town where a third of the front doors open onto a single life has a particular rhythm to it, and it is not the version that ends up photographed.
Qualifications come out mixed. About 33% of residents hold something at degree level, about 16% hold no qualifications at all, and full-time students account for about 2%. That last figure says the same thing the age profile does, in fewer syllables.
Almost everyone here lives in a private household. Only 89 residents live in communal establishments such as care homes, so the household shares above describe very nearly the whole town rather than a slice of it.
On the wider social measures the population profile lands middling: comfortable without being wealthy, stable without being stagnant, and weighted firmly towards the second half of life. None of that is a problem to be solved. It is a town that has already worked out what it is and stopped auditioning.