People who already own their house, mostly outright of the mortgage-market's attention. Roughly seven in ten are owner-occupiers. The typical resident is in their late forties. Nearly a third of households are one person living alone. Fewer than one in five households are a couple with children at home. This is a town of established households rather than one filling up with new ones.
The tenure split is the first thing that explains the rest. About 69% of households own their home, about 19% rent privately and about 10% rent from a social landlord. In a town where holiday letting competes for the same buildings, a private rented sector under a fifth is not an accident: the stock that would be rented to residents elsewhere is rented by the week here.
On age, the median resident is 48, and only about 22% of the population falls in the 25 to 44 band that most towns build around. That is the demographic signature of somewhere people arrive at rather than start from. The under-forties who are here are either working remotely, working locally in a seasonal economy, or both.
Household income, modelled by the Office for National Statistics, came to about £51,300 for the financial year to March 2023. That is gross, before tax and before anything else, and it describes that year rather than today. For a coastal town with no railway and a large seasonal element to its economy, it is a respectable figure, and it sits alongside house prices that require most buyers to be bringing equity rather than salary.
The household shapes, all from the 2021 Census which is the source for every population figure here, are what you would expect of that age profile. About 31% of households are a single person living alone, and about 16% of all households are a pensioner living alone, which is a subset of that first figure rather than an addition to it. Couples with children make up about 17%, and lone parents about 9%. Put plainly, more households here contain one person than contain a family with children.
Qualifications run higher than the seasonal-economy stereotype suggests. About 37% of residents hold a degree-level qualification, about 15% have none at all, and about 1% are full-time students. That is a varied picture rather than a uniform one: people who came with professional careers and can work from a spare room, alongside people who have worked the local economy their whole lives.
Health reads well. About 80% of residents describe their health as good or very good, and about 6% as bad or very bad. Two wider measures are published for the Cornwall council area rather than for the town: smoking prevalence sits at about 12%, rated similar to England, and the preventable mortality rate is also rated similar to England. Those describe the council area as a whole, and neither is a statement about anyone living on a particular street.
The population here is middling in the ordinary sense of the word: comfortable without being wealthy, older without being retired wholesale, and settled enough that the housing market turns over slowly. If you are under forty with young children, you will find your people, but you will have to look for them.