Two populations sharing one boundary and barely overlapping. Most households own their homes outright or on a mortgage. Most of those households are couples, families and older single people in bungalows. Then there is a campus full of undergraduates inside the same lines on the map, and every published average for this place has been dragged sideways by them. Read the village and the halls separately or you will misread both.
On tenure, this is an owner's village. Around 71% of households own, about 16% rent privately and about 12% rent from a social landlord. For a place containing a university campus, that owner share is higher than anyone would guess, and it tells you the halls are counted as communal establishments rather than as rented households.
The age figures are where the trouble starts. The published median age for the area is 23, which would make this one of the youngest settlements in Cornwall and is complete nonsense as a description of the village. The area holds 918 residents aged 15 to 19 and 465 aged 20 to 24, against fewer than 130 in almost every other five-year band. Meanwhile only about 14% of residents fall into the 25 to 44 range, which is the band a young village would actually be full of. The median is describing a hall of residence with a village attached.
Household income, modelled for the wider area covering this village, ran to about £49,850 gross in the financial year to March 2023. That is before any tax comes off it, and it describes that year rather than today. It sits alongside a deprivation ranking in the eighth decile nationally, meaning comfortable rather than wealthy.
Household shapes come from the 2021 Census, which is the source for every population figure here. About 26% of households are one person living alone, and roughly 15% of all households are a single pensioner, which is a subset of that first figure rather than an addition to it. Couples with children make up about 18%, and lone parent households about 9%. That is the profile of a settled residential village: retired people who bought decades ago, families in three-bedroom houses, and not much churn in between.
On qualifications, about 24% of residents hold a degree-level qualification and about 8% hold none at all. The census records around 10% as full-time students, but that category only counts students who also have a job or are looking for one, so it dramatically understates the student presence here. Anyone reading that figure as the student share of the population will be out by a wide margin.
Health self-reports are good: about 86% of residents describe their health as good or very good, and about 3% as bad or very bad. At Cornwall level, against England as a whole, smoking rates are similar and the preventable mortality rate is similar. Those are council-area measures rather than the village's own, and they describe services and circumstances rather than the people living in them.
The scale of the split deserves stating plainly. Of 2,934 residents, 1,232 live in communal establishments and 1,702 live in private households. The village that buyers are actually moving into is the second number, and every share on this page should be read with the first one in mind.
The people here are settled, comfortable and healthy, with a student population bolted on that changes the statistics far more than it changes the street. Buy here and you join the 1,702, not the 1,232.