Owners, and mostly ones who have stopped moving. Nearly nine in ten households own their home. The typical resident is in their late fifties. About a quarter of households are one person living alone. Wembury is not somewhere people pass through on the way to somewhere else, and the numbers make that unusually plain.
Every population figure here comes from the 2021 Census, which puts owner-occupation at about 88%. Private renting accounts for roughly 8% and social renting about 4%. That is not a rental market, it is a set of exceptions. Anyone hoping to try the village for a year before committing will find the try-before-you-buy option mostly theoretical.
The age profile is the second half of the same story. The median age is about 57. Residents aged 25 to 44, the years when people typically move for work and start families, account for about 16% of the population. That is a village where the school-run generation is a visible minority rather than the default, and where the person next to you in the shop queue has almost certainly lived here longer than you will.
Modelled household income for the area came to about £62,000 a year gross, meaning before tax, for the financial year to March 2023. After tax the same modelling puts it near £47,000. Both describe that year rather than this one, and both are area averages rather than anybody's actual payslip. In a place with this age profile, the composition of a household income and the source of it are not the same question, and the gross figure quietly flatters households whose money stopped being a salary some time ago.
Household make-up follows the age curve. Around 27% of households are a single person living alone, and about 18% of all households are a pensioner living alone, that second figure being part of the first rather than an addition to it. Couples with dependent children make up roughly 15%, and lone-parent households about 6%. So the archetypal Wembury front door opens onto either a couple who have finished raising children or one person who has outlived that arrangement.
On qualifications, about 43% of residents hold a degree-level qualification, roughly 11% hold none, and around 1% are full-time students. The student figure is the one worth pausing on: there is effectively no student population here at all, which means no term-time rhythm, no houses in multiple occupation and nothing that empties out in July. Whatever the village is like in February is what it is like in June.
Wembury's population is one of its genuine strengths: settled, comfortable, well established, and about as far from transient as English housing gets. The flip side is written into the same numbers. This is a village that is very good at keeping people and noticeably less good at acquiring new ones under forty.