People who already own the house they are standing in. Around seven in ten homes here are owner-occupied. The typical resident is in their mid-fifties. A third of households are one person on their own. Mere is a town of settled owners rather than arrivals, and the numbers do not pretend otherwise.
On tenure, about 69% of households own their home outright or with a mortgage, and around 15% rent privately. That is a market where most of the housing is already spoken for and the turnover comes from life events rather than lease ends. Renters exist here, they are simply not the reason the high street looks the way it does.
The age profile is the fact that explains most of the others. The median resident is 55. Only about 17% of people fall in the twenty-five to forty-four band, which is the stretch of life that generates nurseries, noise and second cars. A town can be pleasant and quiet, or it can be full of people in their thirties. It is difficult to arrange both, and Mere has picked.
Modelled household income for the area ran to about £52,000 in the financial year to March 2023, before any tax comes out of it. That is a gross figure describing that year rather than this one, and it is worth reading as comfortable rather than wealthy. No national comparison is offered here, because the numbers people carry in their heads for average earnings are usually wrong in one direction or the other.
Household make-up comes from the 2021 Census, as does every population figure on this page. About 34% of households are a single person living alone, and around 21% are a pensioner living alone, that second figure being a slice of the first rather than an addition to it. Couples with dependent children account for roughly 13% of households, and lone parents about 7%. What that produces is a town where a great many front doors have one name behind them, and where the school gate is a smaller institution than the churchyard.
On qualifications, about 32% of residents hold a degree-level qualification and around 16% hold none at all. Full-time students make up about 1%, which is what happens in a place with no campus and a long journey to anywhere that has one. The mix is ordinary for a market town of this size, and it ranks nobody.
Health reads well. About 80% of residents describe their health as good or very good, and around 5% describe it as bad or very bad, which for a population with this age profile is a respectable result. At the wider Wiltshire level, and this is a local-authority measure rather than Mere's own, the preventable mortality rate is better than the England average and the adult smoking rate is similar to it.
Of the 3,107 people counted here, 3,081 live in private households, so the small number in communal establishments does not distort any of the shares above.
The population picture lands in the middle: comfortable, healthy, well housed, and older than the marketing photographs on any estate agent's window would suggest. Whether that reads as calm or as quiet depends entirely on which decade of your own life you are currently in.