People who have already made their last big move. Roughly two in three households own their home. The typical resident is closer to fifty than to thirty. A third of front doors open on one person. This is a town of settled arrangements rather than transitional ones, and most arrivals are arriving to stop rather than to pass through.
About 63% of households own their home, about 20% rent privately and about 17% rent socially. Ownership at that level sets the tempo of a place. Owners stay, stayers accumulate opinions about the town, and the housing market moves at the speed of people's circumstances rather than their ambitions.
The median age is 49, and about 22% of residents are aged between 25 and 44. That is not a town stripped of working-age adults, but the centre of gravity sits with households who finished the school run a while back and have no intention of restarting it.
Modelled household income for the area came to about £49,000 gross in the financial year to March 2023, or roughly £38,000 once tax is out. Gross is the figure people quote at dinner parties and net is the figure that buys the shopping, and both describe 2023 rather than this morning.
Every population figure here comes from the 2021 census. About 33% of households are a single person, and about 20% are a pensioner living alone, which sits inside that third rather than alongside it. About 16% are a couple with children and about 8% are a lone parent, across roughly 1,989 households in total. A town where one-person households outnumber families with children is not a town in trouble, whatever the estate agent's photographs of trampolines imply.
About 27% of residents hold a degree-level qualification and about 20% hold none at all, with about 2% in full-time study. That is a wide spread rather than a uniform one, and it describes a working town rather than a commuter dormitory with a station attached.
Around 80% of residents describe their health as good or very good, with about 6% describing it as bad or very bad. Measured across the Dorset local authority rather than the town, preventable mortality is rated better than England as a whole, and smoking prevalence of about 10% is rated similar to England. Those two belong to the county rather than to any particular street, and should be read that way.
Seventy residents live in communal establishments rather than private households, out of a population of about 4,400. That is small enough not to distort any of the shares above, which is worth saying because in some towns it would.
The population here comes out ordinary in the most useful sense of the word: older than the national middle, comfortable rather than wealthy, healthy on the county measures, and not much given to turnover. Anyone hoping for a place where nobody notices the new car has picked the wrong town entirely.