About twenty-seven thousand people, and the median one of them is forty-five. Roughly a fifth rent privately. Nearly a third of households are one person on their own. Fifteen in every hundred households are a pensioner living alone. This is a town of small, settled households rather than a place with a revolving door.
On tenure, about 64% of homes are owner-occupied, about 21% are rented privately and about 14% are social housing. That is a town where most people have bought in and stayed, with a private rental sector big enough to matter and small enough that it does not set the tone.
The 2021 census puts the median age at 45, with about 23% of residents aged between 25 and 44. Neither a young town nor a retirement one, which in Cornwall is less common than the brochures for the county would have you believe.
Median household income, modelled by the Office for National Statistics and averaged across the area, was about £45,000 before tax for the financial year to March 2023, with about £35,000 of that surviving after tax. That figure describes 2023 rather than today, and it describes a household rather than a wage, so anyone reading it as a salary is reading it wrong.
Families are present without dominating. About 17% of households are a couple with children and about 11% are a lone parent. The schools are full, but this is not a town where the school run is the organising principle of the entire week.
The larger story is people living alone. About 31% of households are a single person, and about 15% of all households are a pensioner living by themselves, which is a subset of that figure rather than an addition to it. All of these come from the 2021 census, as does every population figure on this page. A town where one household in three contains one person is a town with a particular relationship to its shops, its buses and its neighbours, whatever the marketing says about community.
On qualifications, about 25% of residents hold a degree-level qualification and about 18% hold none at all, with about 2% in full-time study. That is a working town with a real spread rather than a graduate enclave or its opposite, and the two ends of it live on the same streets.
For health, about 78% of residents report good or very good health and about 7% report bad or very bad. Zooming out to Cornwall as a whole, the council area sits similar to England on smoking, at about 12% of adults, and similar to England on preventable mortality. Those are county-level measurements with an England benchmark rather than a reading taken in this town, and they describe a place that is unremarkable in the way most people would actually want.
Who lives here is the least dramatic answer on this page, which is its own kind of information. Middling on every measure that gets used to rank places, and made up almost entirely of people who bought a house, stayed in it, and were never going to be a case study for anything.