Owner-occupiers in their fifties, mostly, with a rented minority keeping the place functioning. Seven in ten own. The typical resident is in the early fifties and the twenty-five to forty-four bracket is thin. A third of households are one person on their own. This is a town of settled households rather than arriving ones, and the people who do arrive tend to be doing it at the end of a career rather than the start of one.
On tenure, about 69% of households own their home, about 22% rent from a private landlord and about 10% rent from a social one. Ownership at that level means the housing here is mostly people staying put, which is pleasant if you are one of them and slow going if you are waiting for one of them to move.
The median age is 52, and about 18% of residents fall in the twenty-five to forty-four band. That second figure sits underneath most of the impressions people form on a first visit, before they have worked out why.
Income is modelled rather than measured. Household income for the area came out at about £59,000 gross, before any tax, in the financial year to March 2023, with about £44,000 as the equivalent net figure. It describes that year, not this one, and gross is doing a lot of the work in that sentence.
Families are a minority. About 15% of households are a couple with dependent children, and about 8% are lone-parent households, which puts most of the town's daily rhythm outside the school gate rather than around it.
Every population figure here comes from the 2021 census. About 34% of households are one person living alone, and about 19% are a pensioner living alone, that second group sitting inside the first rather than being added to it. A third of the front doors opening onto a single household is the sort of statistic that gets sold as community spirit and mostly means people notice when a car they do not recognise parks up.
On qualifications, about 39% hold something at degree level, about 15% hold no qualifications at all, and full-time students account for around 1%. That is a wide spread for a town this small, and both numbers describe the same streets, which is worth holding onto before anybody constructs a type out of either end of it.
Of the 1,729 residents, 28 live in communal establishments rather than private households, which is small enough that it leaves every share above unchanged.
The population reads as ordinary in the least insulting sense available: settled, older, mixed in what it earns and what it studied, with nothing in the file that flatters it and nothing that ought to worry anyone. Who lives here is not the thing that will decide this for you. The commute and the heating bill will.