Street is a town of settled owner-occupiers with a boarding school bolted onto one edge. Two-thirds own their homes. A third of households are a single person. The median resident is in their early forties. Nothing about the make-up here is dramatic, which turns out to be the finding rather than the absence of one.
On tenure, around 64% of households own their home, around 20% rent privately and around 14% rent from a social landlord. That is the profile of a working town rather than a retirement coast or a commuter dormitory. The social rented share is high enough to matter and the private rented share is low enough that anyone arriving expecting a deep pool of rental stock will find the pool considerably shallower than the town's size suggests.
The median resident is 42, and around 22% of the population falls in the twenty-five to forty-four bracket. Street is middle-aged without being retired. It is not a place young professionals arrive at in numbers, and the age profile reflects a town people move to for a house and a school run rather than for a scene.
Household income was modelled by the Office for National Statistics at around £48,400 for the financial year to March 2023. That is gross, before tax, and it describes that year rather than this one. Treat it as a marker of where the town sat rather than what anyone is earning now.
The 2021 Census, which is the source for every population figure on this page, records around 33% of households as a single person living alone. Around 17% of all households are a pensioner living alone, which sits inside that single-person share rather than alongside it. Couples with dependent children account for around 18% of households and lone parents around 10%. A third of homes containing one person is a high figure for a town this size, and it changes what the housing market here is actually being asked to supply.
On qualifications, around 26% of residents hold a degree-level qualification, around 19% hold none at all, and around 2% are full-time students. That spread is wider at both ends than a single average would let on, and it describes a town that has both a professional layer and a substantial workforce that went straight into work.
Around 82% of residents report their health as good or very good, with around 5% reporting it as bad or very bad. Widening out to the Somerset council area, which is a county-level benchmark rather than a Street measurement, preventable mortality sits better than the England figure, and smoking at around 11% of adults is similar to England overall.
One structural point that changes how the rest should be read: of a total population of 12,982, around 12,059 live in private households and 923 live in communal establishments. That is a large communal population for a town this size, and it means the household-based shares above describe the town's houses rather than every person in the town. Boarding accommodation and care settings account for the difference, and neither group turns up in the tenure figures at all.
The people of Street sit squarely in the comfortable middle: not struggling, not affluent, and not much interested in being described as either. It is a town that shows up for work, owns its house, and would rather you did not make a study of it.