Bloomsbury is lived in by students, by single people in rented flats, and by a long-settled group of social tenants who have watched both come and go. Very few people own their homes. The typical resident is about 30. Nearly half of households are one person living alone. Children are rare enough to be noticed.
Only about 21% of Bloomsbury's households own their home. About 37% rent privately and about 40% rent from a council or housing association, so the district is really two rental markets on the same streets. One is the private flat that turns over every year or two. The other is the social tenancy, and its tenants have often been here longer than the landlords in the first group.
The median resident is 30, and about 30% of people are aged 25 to 44. The age profile peaks sharply in the late teens and early twenties, which is the halls and the private flatshares making themselves felt. Bloomsbury gets younger every September and older again every June.
Household income across the area, as modelled by the Office for National Statistics, averages about £74,000 a year before tax for the financial year to March 2023. That average is taken across a district where a student on a loan and a professor in a mansion flat count for the same, so it describes very few actual households.
Every population figure on this page comes from the 2021 Census. About 47% of households are one person living alone, and about 11% are a single pensioner living alone, a smaller group inside that larger one. Couples with dependent children make up about 8% of households and lone parents about 9%. Bloomsbury's typical household is one person and a great many books.
About 50% of residents aged 16 and over hold a degree, and about 11% have no formal qualifications. The census counts about 6% as full-time students, but that measure only includes students who are also working or looking for work, so it badly understates the student population in a district like this one. Half the adults have a degree, and a fair few of the rest are part way through getting one.
About 84% of residents describe their health as good or very good, which is what a district full of people in their twenties will tell you. Camden's rate of preventable deaths is better than the England average, and the borough's smoking rate, at about 12%, is similar to the national figure. Those are measures for the whole borough, and they say how Camden compares, not anything about these particular streets.
About 3,470 of Bloomsbury's 20,043 residents live in communal establishments, mostly student halls, and about 16,573 live in private households. That makes it a university quarter with a residential district round the edges, and it shifts every other figure on this page: the young median age, the high renting share and the shortage of families all lean towards the halls. Anyone buying a flat here should look at the 16,573, because those are the neighbours who will still be there next year.
On the measures this page uses to judge who lives here, Bloomsbury comes out below average, with deprivation scores dragged down by a community split between people passing through and people with no particular way out. The people who stay are a smaller, older and more mixed group than the district's student reputation suggests.