Covent Garden is home to young professionals, students and long-standing social tenants, and few of them own anything. Most rent. Most live alone. The typical resident is in their mid-thirties, with a degree and no children. What is unusual is how few people live in such a famous place at all.
About 20% of Covent Garden's households own their home. About 46% rent privately and another 33% rent from a social landlord. So a third of households rent from a council or housing association, in a district where the median flat sale is £999,999. The two groups live side by side, sometimes on the same staircase.
The median resident is 35, and people aged 25 to 44 make up about 35% of the population. The 2021 Census profile is young and working. Covent Garden doesn't feel old, but it doesn't feel like a student quarter either.
Modelled average household income was about £76,600 before tax in the financial year to March 2023, and the matching after-tax estimate is about £52,200. That figure comes from the Office for National Statistics, averaged over every household in the area, so private renters on City salaries and social tenants are all in the same number. It describes the mix and fits few of the households in it.
The 2021 Census counted about 54% of households as one person living alone. About 10% of all households are a single pensioner living alone, which is part of that 54% and not on top of it. Couples with children make up about 6% and lone parents about 7%. Buggies are rare on the stairs, and so are school runs.
About three in five residents hold a degree and about 11% have no qualifications. The census puts full-time students at about 3%, but that figure only counts students who also work or are looking for work, so it badly undercounts the real student population here. Ask anyone walking past the Courtauld Institute of Art and you'll get a different answer.
More than 85% of residents describe their health as good or very good, and about 5% as bad or very bad. At the level of Westminster as a whole, preventable deaths come out better than the England average and smoking, at about 14% of adults, is similar to it. Those borough-wide comparisons describe Westminster, and they don't tell you anything about Covent Garden's own streets.
Of about 8,000 residents, 649 live in communal establishments, things like halls and boarding houses, and the other 7,352 live in private households. The Royal Ballet School boards its pupils here and the Courtauld Institute of Art is within the boundary, though neither accounts for the whole communal figure. They push the age profile down and the qualification share up, and they help explain why so few households are families.
Covent Garden is a middling place on who lives here: well educated and mostly healthy, but a district of single renters with very few owners and almost no children.