Older, less affluent and more permanent than the visitor economy implies. Just over half own their homes, and a large slice of the rest rent from a social landlord rather than a private one. The typical resident is in their early fifties. More than a third of households are one person living alone. Behind the galleries and the harbour is an ordinary Cornish town on ordinary Cornish wages.
On tenure, Census 2021 records about 57% of households owning their home and about 17% renting privately, with the remainder in social housing. For a place with a heavy holiday-let presence, a private rented share that modest says something about what happens to housing here when the summer pays better than a tenant does.
The age profile leans older. The median age is 51, and only about 20% of residents are in the 25 to 44 band, which is the group most places rely on for their workforce and their school rolls. That is a town whose demographic centre of gravity has moved past the family-forming years.
Income is modest. Modelled gross household income, before any tax comes off, averaged about £43,000 for this area in the financial year to March 2023. That figure describes that year rather than today, and it is a modelled average for the wider statistical area rather than a survey of doorsteps here.
Household shapes are unusual, and this is where the town's character really shows. Around 36% of households are a single person, about 12% are a couple with children, and about 13% are a lone parent with children.
All of those population figures come from Census 2021. Within that 36% living alone, about 20% of all households are a pensioner on their own, so the two are not separate groups and should not be stacked. A town where one in five households is an older person living by themselves has different daily rhythms, different service needs and a different winter from one built around young families.
Qualifications split fairly evenly at both ends. About 31% of residents hold a degree-level qualification and about 17% hold none at all, with full-time students accounting for around 1%. That is a mix of the professionally qualified and the vocationally skilled sharing the same streets, which is what a town that runs on hospitality, trades and remote work actually looks like.
Health is reasonable on the self-reported measure, with about 77% describing their health as good or very good and about 7% as bad or very bad. On wider measures, Cornwall as a whole sits similar to England on preventable mortality and similar to England on smoking, with about 11% of adults smoking. Those are local authority figures benchmarked against England rather than anything measured on this town's streets.
One small note on how to read the shares: 63 of the area's residents live in communal establishments such as care homes rather than private households, which is too small a number to shift any of the household percentages above.
The population picture here sits below average on the measures that matter to buyers: modest incomes, an older age profile, and a small working-age core carrying a town whose economy peaks for a few months a year. It is a real community rather than a resort with residents attached, but nobody should mistake the property prices for local prosperity.