Merriott is owned rather than rented, and the owners are not young. Three in four households own their home. Roughly one in eight rents privately. The typical resident is in their early fifties. This is a village of people who finished moving house a while ago and have no intention of doing it again.
On tenure, about 74% of households own, 12% rent privately and 13% rent from a social landlord. That last figure is the one people miss. Social renting here is as large a share as the private rented market, which is unusual enough in a Somerset village to be worth saying plainly, and it means the housing mix is less uniform than the conservation area suggests from the road.
The age profile is where the village shows its hand. The median age is 51, and only about 19% of residents fall in the 25 to 44 band that most places rely on to fill schools and staff the pubs. Nobody engineered that. It is what happens when housing stock is family-sized, ownership is high and nothing turns over quickly.
Income, modelled at neighbourhood level, came out at roughly £51,900 gross for the financial year to March 2023, with a modelled net figure of about £36,900 after tax. Those describe that year rather than today, and they are estimates for the area rather than anybody's payslip. Comfortable is the honest word. Wealthy is not.
Household make-up comes from the 2021 Census, which is the source for the population figures throughout. About 28% of households are one person living alone, and 16% of all households are pensioners living alone, a group sitting inside that first figure rather than alongside it. Couples with dependent children account for about 18%, and lone parents about 7%.
On qualifications, roughly 30% of adults hold a degree-level qualification, about 19% hold none at all, and around 2% are full-time students. That is a genuinely mixed picture rather than a professional enclave or its opposite, and it describes the range of people living in the same postcode rather than any ranking of them. The village has retired professionals and it has people who left school and got on with working, often on the same street and frequently in the same family.
Health, as residents report it, is reasonable: about 79% describe their health as good or very good, and around 5% as bad or very bad. Widening out to the Somerset local authority, the preventable mortality rate is better than the England benchmark, and adult smoking runs at about 11%, similar to England as a whole. Those wider figures cover the whole county rather than this village, and they reflect health services, age structure and geography rather than anything about the people here.
For completeness, 28 residents live in communal establishments rather than private households. It is a small enough number that it changes nothing about how the household shares should be read.
The people here are settled, older than average, comfortable rather than rich, and rooted in homes they own. That combination gives Merriott one of its stronger suits: a population that is stable in a way most places have stopped being.