Holborn is connected to almost everything and needs very little of it. Hardly anyone here takes a train to work. Hardly anyone drives. Most people walked to work or never left the flat. The connections are excellent, and the residents barely use them.
The mainline stations ring the district. City Thameslink and Farringdon are the nearest, with London Kings Cross, St Pancras International, Euston and Blackfriars within reach. Yet at the 2021 census only about 2% of Holborn's working residents took the train to work. There are 56 bus stops in and around the area, and about 6% of residents commuted by bus. A neighbourhood ringed by terminals still has only one resident in fifty who uses them to get to work.
The way Holborn gets to work is mostly by staying put or walking. At the 2021 census, during the pandemic, about 56% of working residents worked from home, about 17% walked, about 4% cycled and only about 3% drove. About 81% of households have no car, and about 3% have more than one. In a district this central, a car is mainly something to find a space for.
The Department for Transport's journey-time statistics, modelled for the area, put the nearest town centre about 10 minutes away by car, 18 by public transport, 11 by bike and 21 on foot. The same modelling puts a GP surgery about 4 minutes away on foot or by public transport and 7 by car, a hospital 11 minutes by car and 14 by public transport, a food shop 4 minutes' walk away or 6 by car, and a large employment centre 6 minutes by public transport or 12 by car. These are modelled averages from 2019. The distances won't have changed, but bus and train services have been cut since then, so the public transport times are the least reliable of the set. On these figures the doctor and the supermarket are a short walk from the door, and the car is the slowest way to reach work.
Broadband is close to complete. Gigabit connections reach about 92% of Holborn's premises, ultrafast and superfast each reach about 92% too, and no premises fall below the minimum the universal service obligation sets. Every network's 4G or 5G signal reaches every postcode, so the only dead spot is somewhere deep in a basement.
Holborn has 23 public charge points for electric cars, carrying 43 connectors between them, and none of them is rapid. A driver here charges overnight or waits for it, and most residents have no car to charge.
In practice, a working week in Holborn means a walk to an office or a laptop at the kitchen table, with buses and the stations held in reserve. A commuter heading further afield has one of the best-placed starting points in the country.
The buses that do run here are frequent. Each of Holborn's stops with timetable data sees an average of 881 scheduled departures on a weekday, about 46 an hour at the peak, and every one has a service at the weekend. These are current timetable counts, unlike the modelled journey times above, and at those frequencies nobody bothers learning the timetable.
All that traffic makes noise. Every one of Holborn's postcodes is near road noise of 65 decibels or more, the level at which official noise mapping treats road noise as significant, and the loudest band recorded reaches 75 decibels or above. Rail noise registers at none of them, because the trains run underground or out of earshot. For a flat facing a main road, stand in the bedroom with the window open at rush hour and decide whether that sound is acceptable for the length of a mortgage. No map can predict how it sounds inside a particular room.
On paper Holborn is middling for connectivity, because so few of its residents take a train or a bus to work. On the ground, almost everything they need is a few minutes' walk away.