People who bought a house here and then stopped looking. Around three quarters own their homes. The median age sits in the mid-forties. More than a quarter of households are one person living alone. This is a town whose population made its decision some time ago and has not felt the need to revisit it.
On tenure, around 76% of households own their home outright or with a mortgage, around 13% rent privately and around 10% rent from a social landlord. A private rented sector that size means the town turns over slowly, which reads as stability if you already own one of the houses and as a closed door if you do not.
The age profile follows from that. The median resident is 44, and around 23% of the population falls in the twenty-five to forty-four band. That is the shape of a town people move to once they have worked out what they want, rather than one they pass through in their twenties while deciding.
Household income, modelled by the Office for National Statistics, came to around £54,100 gross for the financial year to March 2023, or around £40,100 after tax. Both figures describe that year rather than this one, so treat them as a description of the town's footing rather than a guide to what the neighbours are earning now.
Census 2021 is the source for the household picture, and every population share here comes from it. Around 27% of households are one person on their own, and around 14% of all households are a pensioner living alone, which sits inside that first figure rather than alongside it. Couples with children make up around 20%, and lone parent households around 9%. A town where a substantial share of front doors open onto one person's evening is a town with a real stake in whether the buses keep running and whether the shops on the high street survive.
On qualifications, around 25% of residents hold a degree-level qualification and around 18% hold none at all. Full-time students account for around 2% of the population, so whatever this town argues about on a Friday night, it is not students.
Health self-reporting is decent. Around 83% describe their health as good or very good and around 5% as bad or very bad. Two wider measures cover Bath and North East Somerset as a whole rather than this town specifically: the preventable mortality rate sits better than the England average, and the adult smoking rate, at around 7%, is also better than England. Those are authority-level numbers with a Georgian city inside them, so read them as the regional backdrop rather than a portrait of this particular high street.
What the figures describe is a town in reasonable shape: settled, owner-occupied, older than average, and not straining. The trade-off is that a place this stable has very little room in it for anyone arriving without the deposit to buy their way in.