Southwick's population runs to the pattern of a settled working-age coastal town. About seven in ten households own their homes. The median resident is in their early forties. Household incomes sit in the middle-income band. It reads as a working-age town on a coast that neither ages quickly nor attracts the twenty-something crowd in any volume.
Roughly seven in ten households own their home outright or on a mortgage, which makes ownership the dominant tenure by a wide margin. The renting third splits into about one in seven households in private tenancy and roughly one in six in social housing, which leans slightly toward social rather than private. That mix tells you what the town is: not a landlord-heavy town, not a fully right-to-buy-emptied one, and not a mostly-private-let one either. Most people who live here own the roof over their head.
The median resident is 43, which places Southwick at the working-mid-life end of the age curve. The 25-to-44 band accounts for roughly a quarter of residents, less than a young-professional city would show but ordinary for a small coastal town. There is more of a middle-age-and-family bulge than an early-career one, which is what you get when housing prices rule out the first-time-buyer market as effectively as they do here. Not a town people arrive at from university. Not a town people retire to either. The mid-thirties-to-early-sixties range dominates the streets.
Median household income sits near £52,000 a year, a middle-income figure that puts the town in comfortable rather than struggling territory. Unemployment runs at about 2%, low by any yardstick. The Index of Multiple Deprivation puts Southwick in the upper half of English neighbourhoods on the average score. Not a wealthy town. Not a struggling one. The sort of income landscape that keeps the local economy ticking without being anything anyone would show off about at a dinner party.
Household make-up runs to the standard south-coast pattern. Roughly a quarter of households are single-person, with single pensioners making up about one in seven of the total household count. Just over a fifth of households are couples with children. Just over one in ten households is a lone parent. Overcrowding is low, at under 4%. About one in five households runs no car at all, and nearly four in ten households run two or more, which tells you the town has both car-lite pockets and family-car streets in equal measure.
Three out of five is the honest verdict on who lives here. A settled, working-age, home-owning population with a middle-income profile and health outcomes at or slightly above the national baseline. Not a striking demographic. Not a struggling one. The kind of population that keeps a coastal town running without either the trend articles or the cautionary tales.