An older, propertied, coastal population that has mostly stopped moving. Half the residents are over 50. Four in five households own the home they live in. Roughly one in five rents. The typical household lives on around £54,000 a year, and the numbers stack together into a picture that is not urban and is not transient.
Owner-occupation runs at roughly 81% of households, which puts the village well ahead of the national tenure picture and consistent with a housing stock built for occupation rather than for a rental market. Private renting sits at about 13% and social renting at about 5%. Between them, the rental sector covers around one in five homes here, which is smaller than a town of the same size would carry and larger than a pure retirement pocket further inland would maintain. The rental market that exists mostly runs on flats and smaller terraces, because that is where the yields work.
The median age of 50 puts the village materially above the national median and above most of the wider Wealden district. Only about one in five residents falls in the 25 to 44 age band, which is the age band that carries the young-family and first-time-buyer market elsewhere. Read together, those two figures explain the housing turnover, the crime rate, the school provision, and the character of the working day here better than any single statistic on its own.
Median household income sits at around £54,000 a year, which lands broadly in line with the wider South East and modestly above the national median. That number is not driven by London commuters, because the train service does not really support that pattern from here. It reflects a mix of pension and investment income for the retired half, employment income for the working-age half, and a decent slice of working-from-home earnings that the strong rural broadband makes viable.
Household composition follows the age profile. Around a quarter of all households are single-person, and about one in six is specifically a single pensioner living alone. Couples with dependent children account for around one in five households, which is smaller than a suburb but keeps the primary schools full. Lone-parent families make up about one in twelve. The result is a village dominated by settled owner-occupiers, with a strong retirement segment, a working-age minority, and a smaller but continuing family share.
The verdict lands at four out of five, and it fits. This is a coastal village of settled residents who have mostly finished making housing decisions, and it works better for the people who join that description than for those who don't.