Owners, and not many of them young. Roughly three-quarters own the roof over their heads. One household in five is a pensioner living alone. The middle of the age range sits in the mid fifties, and the twenty-five to forty-four bracket is thin. This is a village that did its churning a long time ago and has been living with the result ever since.
On tenure, Census 2021 puts owner-occupation at about 77%, with roughly 19% renting privately and around 4% in social housing. That is a high-ownership village by any standard, and it explains a lot about the texture of the place. Streets where most people own tend to change slowly, look after their hedges, and know exactly who has just moved in.
The age profile is the headline finding. The median resident is 55, and only about 17% of the population falls into the twenty-five to forty-four band. Those are the years when people typically arrive with young children, take out the biggest mortgage of their lives and complain about the school run. Here, that cohort is comparatively small, and the village reads accordingly.
Household income was modelled by the Office for National Statistics at around £43,000 gross before tax, describing the financial year to March 2023 rather than today. That is a household figure rather than an individual one, and it is a before-tax number, so the amount that actually lands in a bank account is meaningfully lower.
Household shapes follow from the age picture. Around 30% of households are a single person living alone, and about 20% of all households are a pensioner living alone, which is a subset of that first figure rather than an addition to it. Couples with dependent children account for roughly 13%, and lone-parent households for about 9%. All of these come from the 2021 census, which is the source for every population figure here.
Put together, that means a village where solo living and older households make up a large share of the doorbells, and where families with children at home are present without being the dominant form. Neither of those is a problem; they simply describe who is likely to be in when the parcel arrives.
On qualifications, about 28% of residents hold a degree-level qualification and around 19% hold none at all, with full-time students at roughly 1%. That is a genuinely mixed picture rather than a uniform one, which is what you would expect from a place that has absorbed both people who worked here and people who retired here.
Health self-reports look reasonable. Around 76% of residents describe their health as good or very good, while about 6% report it as bad or very bad. On the wider measures, Cornwall as a local authority sits similar to England on preventable mortality and similar to England on smoking, where the local rate is around 12%. Those are county-level comparisons rather than the village's own, and they say something about the health system and the region rather than about the people on any particular street.
Almost everybody here lives in a private household. Of a population of 3,572, just 33 people live in communal establishments such as care homes, so none of the shares above need adjusting for that.
The people picture here is middling in the accurate sense: comfortable but not affluent, healthy but not exceptionally so, and heavily weighted toward households who have already made their big decisions. If you are looking for a village in transition, this is not one. It arrived where it was going.