Mostly people who have already done the hard part of their working lives. Seven in ten households own their home. A third of households are a single person living alone. Fewer than one in five residents falls in the twenty-five to forty-four bracket. This is not a town people move to in order to get started, and the numbers are not shy about it.
On tenure, the 2021 census puts owner-occupation at about 71% of households, with roughly 17% renting privately and around 12% in social housing. That is a settled ownership town with a working rental sector rather than a landlord's playground, and it means most of the people on a given street are not going anywhere in the next eighteen months.
The age profile is the defining fact. The median age is 54, and about 19% of residents sit in the twenty-five to forty-four band that most towns rely on for their working core. Anyone describing this as a young family town is reading the brochure rather than the census. What it is instead is a place with an unusually large share of people who are either close to stopping work or have already stopped, which shapes the shops, the pace and the volume of traffic at nine in the morning.
Household income across the area was modelled by the Office for National Statistics at about £48,300 before tax for the financial year to March 2023. That is a gross figure describing that year rather than today, and it covers the wider set of neighbourhoods around the town rather than any particular road.
Household make-up follows the age profile exactly. About 34% of households are one person living alone, and roughly 21% of all households are a single pensioner, which is a subset of that figure rather than an addition to it. Couples with dependent children account for about 13% of households, and lone parents about 9%. Families are present, in other words, but they are the minority arrangement rather than the default one, and the school gate crowd is smaller than the dog-walking crowd by some distance.
On qualifications, about 26% of residents hold a degree-level qualification and around 20% hold none at all, with full-time students making up roughly 1% of the population. The practical version of that last number: there is no student presence here worth speaking of, so nothing about the town changes in September or empties out in July. The town is the same size in every month of the year, which is not true of everywhere on this coast.
Around 343 residents live in communal establishments rather than private households, which is the sort of figure that reflects the fourteen care homes operating in the area. It is small enough not to distort the household figures above, and worth knowing for anyone reading the age profile and wondering where the oldest residents actually live.
The population here is comfortable, stable and quietly well-off in the unshowy way that ownership and low turnover produce, which is one of the better things about the place. Buy here and your neighbours will already know each other, which is a benefit or a warning depending entirely on your temperament.