Roughly thirty thousand people who have mostly stopped shopping around. Two thirds own their homes. The typical resident is in their forties. Three households in ten hold one person. This is a settled town rather than a transient one, and the profile underneath it is about as unremarkable as a place can be without turning into a diagram.
Ownership runs at about 66% of households, with around 19% renting privately and about 13% renting from a social landlord. That is a town where most people are staying put by default rather than by decision, and where the private rental market is a genuine option rather than the only one. Streets change hands slowly at that level of ownership, which suits people who want to know their neighbours and frustrates anyone hoping the character of a road will improve within five years.
The median age is 43, and about 26% of residents are aged between 25 and 44. That places the town squarely in the middle of the demographic range: not a retirement coast, not a student city, and not one of those commuter enclaves where everyone is either thirty-two or eleven. It is a working-age town with a considerable number of people either side of that.
Household income here works out at about £51,000 a year before tax, or roughly £39,000 after it. Both are modelled by the Office for National Statistics and both describe the financial year to March 2023 rather than the present day, which matters given everything that has happened to bills since. Read them as the shape of local earning rather than a current pay packet.
The 2021 census is the source for the population figures on this page, and its household breakdown is the most revealing part. About 30% of households are a single person living alone. Around 14% of all households are a pensioner living alone, and that group sits inside the 30% rather than alongside it. Couples with children account for about 18%, and lone-parent households about 11%. A town where roughly a third of front doors open onto one person is a town with a particular set of needs, and most housing here was designed before anyone considered them.
On qualifications, about 28% of residents hold a degree-level qualification, about 16% hold none at all, and around 1% are full-time students. That is a broad spread rather than a concentration at either end, which is what a market town with an industrial history and a professional service sector tends to produce.
For completeness, 292 people here live in communal establishments such as care homes rather than in private households. That is small enough not to distort any of the shares above.
The people here are the middle of the country, statistically speaking, and the profile lands as ordinary in the least insulting sense of the word. It is a mixed, mostly settled, mostly owning population, without either the affluence or the strain that would make the answer to this question interesting.