People who work for a living and bought where the arithmetic worked. Six in ten own their homes. The rest split almost evenly between private landlords and social housing. The typical resident is in their early forties, and the households are more often one person than a family of four. Not a retirement coast, not a commuter belt. A payroll.
On tenure, about 60 percent of homes are owner-occupied, with roughly 19 percent rented privately and 20 percent rented from a social landlord. That last figure is the one that makes Pool different from most of coastal Cornwall, where social housing has been squeezed out by holiday money. Here the mix is closer to a normal town than a resort, which is also why the place empties in August rather than filling up.
The age profile sits in the middle. The typical resident is 42, and around 26 percent of people are aged between 25 and 44. That is a working population with children in the system rather than a place stacked at either end of the age range.
Income is modest and worth reading carefully. Household income here is modelled at about £41,600 gross for the financial year to March 2023, which is before tax and before anything else leaves the account, with roughly £32,000 of that landing as net income. It describes that year rather than today, and it is a modelled area figure rather than a payslip from any particular street.
Household shapes come from the 2021 Census, which is the source for every population figure on this page. Lone parent households account for about 10 percent, and couples with children about 20 percent. Around 30 percent of households consist of one person living alone, and of those, roughly 12 percent are pensioners living alone, a group contained within that single-person figure rather than added to it. The dominant local household is smaller than the housing stock was built for, which is how three-bedroom terraces end up with one or two people in them.
Qualifications are spread wide rather than clustered. About 25 percent of residents hold a degree-level qualification and about 20 percent hold none at all, with full-time students making up roughly 2 percent. Both ends of that range are present in numbers, which is what a service-centre town looks like when you stop averaging it.
Self-reported health is reasonable: about 78 percent describe their health as good or very good, and about 7 percent as bad or very bad. On the wider measures, which cover the Cornwall council area rather than Pool itself, the preventable mortality rate is rated similar to England as a whole, and the adult smoking rate, at about 12 percent across the council area, is also rated similar to England. That geography matters. It is a county reading, not a street reading, and it says nothing about any individual household here.
One technical note that makes the rest of these figures easier to trust: only 12 residents live in communal establishments such as care homes or halls, so effectively the entire population lives in private households and the shares above describe the place directly rather than being skewed by an institution.
Who lives here is the least flattering part of Pool's numbers and the least dramatic: an ordinary working population on modest incomes, with solid ownership levels, sitting below the national middle on the measures that track how comfortable a place is rather than how pleasant it is to be in.