Holborn's residents are mostly young renters living alone, in a district built for people who go home somewhere else. Barely one household in five owns its home. The typical resident is in their early thirties. Nearly half of households are one person. Students, shift workers and long-standing social tenants share the same streets as the barristers' chambers.
Renting is how almost everyone lives here. At the 2021 census, which supplies every population figure on this page, about 19% of Holborn's households owned their home, about 43% rented privately and about 37% rented from a council or housing association. That social share is the part outsiders miss. Holborn has its private renters on short lets and its long-standing council tenants, and very few owners. Anyone buying into a block should ask the managing agent how many flats are owner-occupied, because in Holborn an owner can easily be the only one in the building.
The median age is 32, and about 34% of residents are between 25 and 44. That age is pulled down by students and young renters, with the University of the Arts London inside the boundary and the London School of Economics and Political Science among the institutions nearby. Holborn's age profile changes every September with the new intake.
The Office for National Statistics modelled gross household income, before tax, at about £78,500 across Holborn for the financial year to March 2023. It is an average across several neighbourhoods, and it blends a well-paid professional sharing a flat with a council tenant on a pension and a student on a loan. As an average it describes very few actual households.
Households are small and mostly adult. About 49% of Holborn's households are one person, and about 9% of all households are pensioners living alone, a group counted inside that single-person share. Couples with children make up about 6% and lone parents about 10%. More of the households with children here are headed by one parent than by a couple, and the overall impression is of single adults and very few prams.
The residents are highly educated. About 58% hold a degree or equivalent, and about 11% have no qualifications. Only about 4% are counted as full-time students, but that census figure only includes students who also work or are looking for work, so it misses most of the students who actually live here. The streets around the universities show the real number every autumn.
At the 2021 census about 83% of Holborn's residents described their health as good or very good. For Camden as a whole, preventable deaths run better than the England average and smoking is about level with it, at around 12% of adults. Those comparisons describe the borough and come from public health records. They say nothing about which Holborn residents smoke or how healthy any particular household is.
Of Holborn's 3,162 residents, 178 live in communal establishments, things like student halls and hostels, with the other 2,984 in private households. That's a small number with a big effect on the averages, adding young residents and non-standard households without changing what most of the streets look like. Holborn is a mix of halls, social housing and private flats, and the average resident is a blend of all three.
The people who live in Holborn are a middling picture: well qualified and mostly healthy, but heavily renting, often on their own, and outnumbered every weekday by the people who only come here to work.