Owners, mostly, and not many of them under forty. A third of households are one person on their own. One in five is a pensioner living alone. Barely one in eight residents falls into the twenty-five to forty-four bracket that most towns are built around. This is a settled population rather than a working one, and everything from the housing market to the opening hours has arranged itself accordingly.
Every population figure here comes from the 2021 Census. On tenure, about 71% of households own their home and about 12% rent privately. The quieter number is social renting at about 16%, which is larger than the private rented share. That is an unusual shape for a coastal town with this kind of price tag, and it means a decent slice of the local workforce is housed by something other than the open market, because the open market long ago stopped being able to house them.
The median age is 59. The share of residents aged twenty-five to forty-four sits at about 13%. In most towns that band is the engine room, the people staffing the schools and the surgeries and filling the nurseries. Here it is a minority group, and the consequences turn up in every rota in town.
Household income runs at about £51,200 a year gross, before tax, modelled for the financial year to March 2023 rather than for today. That is a comfortable figure for a small rural town and it is worth reading carefully, because a settled owner-occupier population contains a lot of households whose wealth arrived before their current income did.
Household make-up follows from the age profile. About 36% of households are a single person, and about 21% of all households are a pensioner living alone, which is a subset of that first figure rather than an addition to it. Couples with dependent children account for about 12%, and lone parents about 7%. Families with school-age children are here, and they are outnumbered several times over by people living by themselves.
On qualifications, about 39% of residents hold a degree-level qualification and about 14% hold none at all. Full-time students make up about 1%, which is what happens in a town with no campus and no cheap flats. The mix is a professional cohort that mostly qualified elsewhere, living alongside people who have worked the harbour, the shops and the visitor season without needing a certificate to do it.
Health self-reports are good. About 80% of residents describe their health as good or very good, and about 5% as bad or very bad, which is a solid result for a population with this median age. Across Dorset as a whole, the local authority benchmark against England puts preventable mortality better than the England average and smoking prevalence similar to it. Those are county-level measures rather than this town's own, and they describe services and outcomes across a large rural area.
Communal establishments account for 80 people out of a population of 4,074, so the household figures above cover very nearly everybody. Nothing here is being distorted by a large institution sitting inside the boundary.
As a population this lands somewhere in the middle: healthy, well qualified, comfortably housed, and conspicuously short of the age group that keeps a town's own staff rooms and kitchens open. It is a good place to arrive at the end of a career and a harder one to start a career in.