People who bought a house here and then stopped moving. Six in ten own their homes. The typical resident is in their early forties. Household incomes are modest and the households themselves are small. This is a working town with a settled population, not a commuter dormitory and not a retirement colony, and the numbers are stubbornly ordinary in a way estate agents find hard to dress up.
On tenure, roughly 61% of households own their home and about 21% rent privately, with the rest in social housing. That ownership share is the backbone of the place. It means neighbours who have been there a while, gardens that have been landscaped by someone who expected to see the trees grow, and a rental market small enough that anyone looking for a flat spends a long time refreshing the same three listings.
The age profile runs older than the national picture without tipping into pensioner territory. The typical resident is 43, and about 24% of the population falls in the 25 to 44 band. There are young families here, and there are people who arrived as young families and never left, which over time amounts to the same streets with different noise levels.
Income is the figure that explains most of the rest. Modelled gross household income before tax ran to roughly £44,500 in the financial year to March 2023, which is the year the modelling describes rather than a current number. That is a working wage rather than a comfortable one, and it is why the housing stock here is three-bedroom houses rather than anything with a gravel drive.
Households are smaller than the family-town image suggests. Around 28% are single-person households, about 19% are couples with children, and roughly 12% are lone-parent households. Every population figure on this page comes from the 2021 census.
Within that single-person share sit the single pensioners, about 13% of all households, who are counted inside the 28% rather than alongside it. The picture that produces is a town of small households in houses built for larger ones, which is the quiet demographic story of most of rural England and nobody's idea of a crisis.
On qualifications, about 27% of residents hold a degree-level qualification and roughly 17% hold none at all, with full-time students accounting for about 2%. That is a broad spread rather than a concentration at either end, and it describes a labour market built on trades, agriculture, services and the people who administer all three.
Health self-reports land close to what the age profile would suggest, with about 78% describing their health as good or very good and roughly 7% as bad or very bad. Across Cornwall as a whole, smoking rates and preventable mortality both sit similar to the England average, which is a local-authority benchmark covering the whole county rather than a reading on this town.
Almost everyone here lives in a private household. Only 27 residents live in communal establishments, so none of the shares above are being distorted by an institution sitting in the middle of the data.
The demographic picture is below average on the measures that track prosperity: modest incomes, a broad qualification spread, and a settled population without much economic momentum behind it. That is not a warning, it is a description, and it is exactly why the houses cost what they do.