Settled households, mostly middle-aged, mostly owning. Six in ten own their homes. The median resident is 44. A third of households are one person living on their own. This is a town people arrive in and stay in, not one they pass through on the way to a bigger job.
Every population figure here comes from the 2021 census, and tenure is where it starts. About 60% of households own their home outright or with a mortgage. About 24% rent privately and about 14% rent from a social landlord. That last pair matters more than the headline: a town where nearly four in ten households do not own is not the freeholder monoculture a Devon market town is usually assumed to be.
The age profile is older than the national middle without being a retirement colony. The median resident is 44, and about 23% of residents fall in the 25 to 44 band that carries most of the childrearing and most of the mortgages. That is a real working-age population, just one that is not being topped up by graduates arriving in their twenties for the nightlife.
On money, modelled household income for the area came to about £46,500 gross in the financial year to March 2023, with about £36,900 of that surviving to be spent after tax. Both figures describe that year rather than this one, and both describe the whole household rather than one earner. Anyone comparing them to a salary they half-remember from a newspaper is comparing two different things and will reach the wrong conclusion twice.
Household shapes are where the town stops matching its own image. Couples with children account for about 19% of households, and lone parents about 11%. Family housing dominates the building stock, but families do not dominate the census.
The rest is smaller households than the three-bedroom semis were built for. About 33% of households are a single person living alone, and about 16% of all households are a pensioner doing so, that second figure sitting inside the first rather than alongside it. A third of the doors in this town open onto one person, which is worth knowing before anyone describes the place as a family town in a listing.
Qualifications split three ways. About 26% of residents hold a degree-level qualification, about 19% hold none at all, and about 1% are full-time students. That is a town with a trades-and-services backbone and a professional layer sitting on top of it, and the near-absence of students explains why the evenings are quiet in a way that no amount of pub count can undo.
The profile that comes out of all this is ordinary in the plainest sense: modest incomes, older than average, a lot of people living alone, and a working population doing working jobs. Measured against the country as a whole it sits below the middle rather than above it, and the town has never pretended otherwise, which is more than can be said for the places selling themselves as its smarter neighbours.