Five hundred and thirty-four people, and most of them have been here a while. The typical resident is closer to sixty than forty. Around six in ten own their homes, and of the rest, far more rent socially than privately. Two in five households are one person on their own. This is not a commuter village that filled up in the last decade, and the tenure split is the tell.
Tenure runs about 60% owner-occupied against roughly 40% renting, and the shape of that renting is the unusual part. Private renting accounts for only around 9% of households, while social renting accounts for about 30%. In a Cornish coastal village where the assumption is holiday lets and second homes all the way down, a social housing share at that level means a genuine year-round population lives here rather than visiting it.
The age profile is older than the county cliché suggests, which is saying something. The median age is about 58, and only around 15% of residents fall in the 25 to 44 band that most places rely on for their school gates, their pub trade and their weeknight economy. Every population figure here comes from Census 2021.
Household income sits at roughly £39,300 gross before tax, modelled for the financial year to March 2023 rather than today. After tax, the modelled net figure is about £32,800. Set that against a village where a typical house changes hands in the four hundreds and you can see why the ownership figure is a legacy of who bought decades ago rather than a description of who could afford to move in today.
Household make-up is dominated by people living alone. About 38% of households are a single person, and roughly 23% are a pensioner living alone, that second figure being a subset of the first rather than an addition to it. Couples with dependent children account for around 10% of households and lone parents about 6%. The village empties out during the working day for reasons that have nothing to do with commuting.
On qualifications, roughly 30% hold a degree-level qualification and about 20% hold none, with full-time students under 1%. That is a fairly ordinary spread for a rural place, and it sits alongside an economy of self-employment, boats and remote work rather than a graduate job market.
Health self-reporting is solid: around 73% describe their health as good or very good, with about 8% describing it as bad or very bad, which in a population this old is a better result than the age profile would predict. At the Cornwall level, smoking prevalence of around 12% is similar to England, and the preventable mortality rate is also similar to England. Those two are council-area figures with an England benchmark, not this village's own.
The population picture here is on the weaker side: older, thinner in working-age households, and modest in income against the price of getting in. What holds it together is that the people who are here are properly here, which is not something every village on this coastline can still say.