Homeowners, mostly, and mostly past fifty. Around three quarters own the roof over their heads. Nearly a third of households are a single person, and the majority of those are pensioners. Families with children exist here, but they are outnumbered by households where the children have already gone. This is a settled population rather than a churning one, and it has been settled for a long time.
On tenure, the 2021 Census puts owner-occupation at 77%, with around 10% renting privately and around 13% in social housing. Every population figure on this page comes from that census. A private rental market of one home in ten is thin, which matters if you are hoping to rent here first and buy later. The stock changes hands by sale, not by tenancy.
The age profile is the defining fact. The median resident is 57. Only around 16% of the population falls in the twenty-five to forty-four bracket, which is the age band that normally supplies a place with its evening economy, its school gate chatter and its late-night noise complaints. West Moors has comparatively little of any of those, and the arithmetic explains why.
Household income runs to around £47,200 gross, before tax, for the financial year to March 2023, with net household income modelled at around £34,800 over the same period. Both are older figures describing that year rather than today. Comfortable is the fair word for it. Nobody here is stretching for a yacht, and nobody is choosing between the heating and the shopping either.
Household make-up follows from the age profile. Around 31% of households are one person living alone, and around 22% are pensioners living alone, that second figure being a subset of the first rather than an addition to it. Couples with dependent children make up around 12%, and lone parent households around 8%. A village where more than one home in five contains a single pensioner is a village with a particular rhythm to its weekdays, and a particular vulnerability if the bus service ever thins further.
On qualifications, around 25% of residents hold a degree-level qualification and around 21% hold none at all. Full-time students account for around 1%, which is what happens in a place with no campus and a long drive to one. The spread is broad rather than concentrated at either end: this is not a graduate enclave and it is not a place education passed by.
Health self-reports come out reasonably for a population of this age. Around 76% describe their health as good or very good, and around 7% as bad or very bad. Across the wider Dorset local authority, which is a much larger geography than this village, the preventable mortality rate is better than the England benchmark, and adult smoking at around 10% is similar to England. Those are county-level standings rather than West Moors figures, and they say something about Dorset rather than about anybody's front door.
Around 104 residents live in communal establishments rather than private households, out of a population of 10,821. That is small enough that it does not distort any of the shares above.
The population here is middling in the most literal sense: comfortable rather than affluent, healthy rather than notably so, well enough educated without being a graduate suburb. What sets it apart is not wealth or status but stability, and the fact that most people arrived with no intention of leaving.