Settled people, mostly past fifty, and a remarkable number of them on their own. Six in ten households own. Two in five are a single person. The typical resident has been alive for half a century. This is not a town in transition, whatever the property particulars are calling it this month.
On tenure, the 2021 census, which is the source for every population figure here, puts owner occupation at about 61%. Private renting accounts for about 19%, and social renting accounts for about 19% as well. That balance is worth noticing. In most towns wearing this much listed stone, the social housing share has been quietly squeezed out of the picture. Here it matches the private rented sector exactly.
The age profile is the fact that shapes everything else. The median resident is 50, and only about 17% of the population sits in the 25 to 44 band that most towns rely on to fill jobs, schools and Friday nights. Sherborne is not old in the caricature sense, but it has fewer people in their thirties than it has people who remember their thirties fondly.
Household income is modelled at about £51,300 for the area, gross and before any tax comes off it, describing the financial year to March 2023 rather than today. That is a comfortable figure and not a lavish one, and it belongs to a town whose housing stock includes a great deal of listed property with the running costs to match.
Household composition explains the quiet. About 41% of households here are a single person, and about a quarter of all households are a pensioner living alone, which is a subset of that first figure rather than an addition to it. Couples with dependent children account for about 12%, and lone parents about 10%. A town where four in ten front doors open onto one person is a town with a particular rhythm to it, and anyone expecting a bustling family suburb has read the architecture rather than the census.
On qualifications, about 36% of residents hold a degree-level qualification and about 16% hold none, with full-time students at roughly 1%. That is a genuinely mixed picture rather than a uniform one, and it fits a town that has both a professional layer and a long working history underneath it.
Health self-reports come in at about 81% describing themselves in good or very good health, with about 5% reporting bad or very bad health. Widening out to the Dorset council area rather than the town, the preventable mortality rate is classified as better than England, and adult smoking, at about 10%, is classified as similar to England. Those are area-wide classifications and they describe the health service catchment rather than any street in Sherborne.
One number changes how all the others should be read. Of the roughly 10,400 people counted here, about 1,100 live in communal establishments rather than private households, with around 9,300 in ordinary homes. In a town with a substantial independent school sector and eight care homes, that is where those residents are. Sherborne quietly houses people at both ends of life in institutions, and the household statistics describe everybody else.
Who lives here lands somewhere ordinary rather than remarkable: a comfortable, older, largely owner-occupying town with a real social housing presence, a thin layer of thirty-somethings, and health and income figures that sit respectably in the middle of the national spread rather than at either edge of it.