Clerkenwell is lived in by young graduates who rent, many of them alone. Owners are a small minority. A third of households rent from a social landlord. The typical resident is in their early thirties. Children are uncommon.
At the 2021 census, which supplies every population figure on this page, about 25% of Clerkenwell households owned their home, about 40% rented privately and about 34% rented from a social landlord. Private tenants and social tenants together far outnumber owners, and the owners are a minority by a distance.
The median age is 33, and about 40% of residents are aged 25 to 44. In Clerkenwell 33 is about the age when people start talking about somewhere with a garden, and the ones who mean it eventually go.
The Office for National Statistics models typical household income across Clerkenwell at about £76,500 a year before tax, for the financial year to March 2023. That is a gross figure and a few years old. Comfortable, though in a place where a typical flat sells for well over half a million, comfortable doesn't go very far.
About 45% of households are one person living alone, and about 7% are single pensioners, who are counted within that 45%. Couples with dependent children make up about 8% of households and lone parents about 9%. The table for one is the house style.
About 61% of residents hold a degree-level qualification and about 10% have no qualifications at all. Only about 3% are full-time students, so the graduates here have already graduated. James Duff Brown, a librarian and information theorist who lived here, would have found plenty of readers on his own street.
About 85% of residents describe their health as good or very good. In Islington as a whole, preventable mortality is worse than the England average and smoking, at about 9% of adults, is similar to it. Those borough-wide comparisons come from Public Health England's successor benchmarks and say nothing about any particular household.
About 911 people live in communal settings such as halls, hostels and care homes, out of 13,655 residents. They are part of the population count but not of the household shares, so the household percentages describe the 6,743 private households. That communal group is part of why a neighbourhood with almost no children still has a population that isn't purely young professionals.
Clerkenwell's residents are a better-than-average crowd: young, well qualified and well paid, alongside a large group of social tenants. It works for people whose household fits in a one-bed flat. Most of the neighbours are renting, and many of them won't be here in a few years.