People who own their houses and have no plans to move on. Around seven in ten are owner-occupiers. The typical resident is nearer forty than thirty. A quarter of households are one person living alone. This is not a town people pass through on the way to somewhere better paid, and whether that reads as stability or stagnation depends entirely on who is doing the reading.
Every population figure here comes from the 2021 census, which counted about 68% of households as owner-occupiers. Private renting accounts for about 15% and social renting about 16%, which makes social tenancy the slightly larger of the two rental routes. That is unusual in the south west and entirely unsurprising in a town that was built to house a workforce rather than to attract investors.
The age profile is squarely middle. The median resident is 39, and about 27% of the population falls in the twenty-five to forty-four band. There is no student bulge and no retirement colony. What there is instead is a working-age town with children in it, which is the demographic shape that keeps schools open and pubs half full on a Tuesday.
Household income runs to about £52,900 a year gross, before tax, as modelled for the financial year to March 2023 rather than for today. After tax that comes down to roughly £39,300. Those are respectable figures for a former coalfield, and they are the reason the housing market here works the way it does: people are earning ordinary money and buying ordinary houses, without the gap between the two requiring a family loan.
Household make-up is more varied than the terraced streets suggest. About 26% of households are a single person living alone, and about 12% are pensioners living alone, that second figure being a portion of the first rather than an addition to it. Couples with dependent children account for about 22%, and lone-parent households about 12%. A quarter of the doors on any street open onto one person's life, which is worth knowing before anyone romanticises the idea of a close-knit valley town.
On qualifications the town splits in a way that is honest rather than flattering. About 24% of residents hold a degree-level qualification and about 18% hold none at all. Full-time students make up about 2%, which confirms what the age profile already implies. Radstock never had a university attached to it and has never pretended to want one.
Health self-reports are steady. About 82% of residents describe their health as good or very good, and about 5% describe it as bad or very bad. Across Bath and North East Somerset as a whole, smoking prevalence sits at about 7% and is classed as better than the England average, and the council area is also classed as better than England on preventable mortality, with a rate of about 107. Those two are authority-wide measures covering Bath and everywhere around it, not a reading taken on these streets.
One technical note that makes the rest cleaner: of the 11,485 people counted here, 66 live in communal establishments such as care homes rather than in private households. Everything else on this page effectively describes the whole town.
The people here are middling in the most literal sense, sitting in the middle of almost every distribution the census measures, which makes Radstock difficult to romanticise and difficult to write off. It is a town of ordinary earnings, ordinary health and unusually settled ownership, and the only group it genuinely does not serve is anyone hoping to be surrounded by people exactly like themselves.