Bromley and Biggin Hill
Feb 7, 2024 23:12:36 GMT
Pete Whitehead, Robert Waller, and 3 more like this
Post by batman on Feb 7, 2024 23:12:36 GMT
BROMLEY AND BIGGIN HILL
This new seat is geographically the central one in the London Borough of Bromley. It is quite a long thin seat stretching from entirely urban areas, some of which have at least a slight whiff of the inner city, in the north right down to some of the most rural areas to be found within Greater London, though neighbouring Orpington has always had such areas too. Biggin Hill, hard by the boundary with the county of Kent as it has been since the formation of the present-day London boroughs, and famous for its long-established small airport, is the most southerly outpost of Greater London of all, and is separated from the rest of the constituency by not only its airport to its north, but by actual farms and countryside. There are some very small villages included in this new seat, and one ward, Darwin (although only part of it is included in this seat), is in fact mostly rural. It is named after Charles Darwin who lived at Down House, although the village immediately to its north is nowadays spelt Downe. It is the home village of Reform UK's President, Nigel Farage, although his party is not particularly strong in this vicinity. This constituency can be regarded as a reasonably safe seat for the Conservatives, and has some very strong areas for that party. It is probably mostly true to say that the further north one goes, and the closest to Bromley, the more political variety is found, and both the Labour and Liberal Democrat Parties hold one ward in the constituency. Biggin Hill ward was years ago Liberal Democrat-held, but emphatically returned to its Conservative heritage for quite a long time; however, while it would be expected to vote comfortably Conservative in general elections, it is currently held by Independents on the council. The new boundaries appear to eliminate the possibility of a Labour gain which existed in the seat in its previous Bromley & Chislehurst incarnation, as the areas coming into this constituency do appear to be substantially more Conservative than the areas leaving it.
Biggin Hill and Darwin wards are the least urban element of the constituency. Biggin Hill is mostly owner-occupied and fairly prosperous but not extravagantly so. The villages are very pleasant if not quite idyllic. There is a little social housing in this part of the constituency but it is very much the minority. Essentially this is fairly standard-issue Tory territory even though in years gone by the Lib Dems were able to win in some rather surprising parts of the borough, having of course held the Orpington parliamentary seat for 8 years up to 1970. The Lib Dems have made a bit of a recovery in the borough of Bromley, but it has been patchy and there are no signs of it spreading into the more rural parts of it yet. This part of the constituency is expected to be the least troublesome for the Tories come the general election.
Two further wards to the north of these are right on the edge of the main built-up area of London; currently after boundary and in one case name changes they are called Bromley Common & Holwood, and Hayes & Coney Hall. The former ward has lost the name Keston from its name but much of Keston is still included, the Holwood estate (a country estate, not a council estate) lying just to its south-east. In the days when Bromley Common had its own more compact council ward, separated from Keston, it was at times competitive, with Labour winning clearly in its inaugural contest in 1964, but in 1971, although that was a particularly strong year in London overall, they had to be content to share the ward with the Conservatives, one of whose councillors was Simon Randall, later to become a major figure in the borough's politics. Labour have never been able to win ever since, although in 1974 one of their candidates was defeated by only four votes. There has been a tendency for Labour's vote to weaken in the Bromley community itself from the early days of the borough, and it is only in very recent years that it has shown gentle signs of revival. Once artisan or working-class cottages have been somewhat gentrified and this southern end of Bromley has become more prosperous than once it was. It did elect Alliance, then Lib Dem, councillors for a number of years and was seen as a stronghold for a time. They were cleared out by the Tories well before their wholesale collapse in much of the borough in 2014. Labour has since seen some revival of its support, and has now for the first time in years built up a coherent vote, its top candidate in 2022 losing by the modest but still clear margin of 477 votes to the bottom Tory. Some of the areas in Bromley itself included in the ward are of very high quality and built between the wars, but there are also many older & smaller houses. Hayes and Coney Hall ward (for a number of years this territory also included Keston in its ward) has an uninterrupted Tory heritage in Bromley council elections, including its linear predecessors. Even in their worst-ever Bromley elections of 1994 the Tories were still miles ahead in the then Hayes ward, their councillors including another very prominent figure in the borough's history, Dennis Barkway. The present Hayes & Coney Hall has given the Tories no trouble either, and can still be regarded as safely Conservative. However, Labour which is traditionally very weak in this area has belatedly started to accumulate a coherent vote, and one of its candidates in the 2022 managed to poll over 1500 votes, very high in what is a very heavily White, very prosperous, very owner-occupied and very outer-ring suburb. This is if anything an even more pleasant place to live than Bromley Common & Holwood, and it is surprising that the Tory majority has now been reduced to the merely comfortable rather than the super-safe. These two wards are mostly but not entirely (sub)urban, mostly but not entirely owner-occupied although there is a council estate element opposite Bromley Common, and comfortably but not overwhelmingly Conservative at present. There has been considerable talk of the Bakerloo Line being extended to Lewisham, and ultimately perhaps all the way to Hayes, which is currently the terminus of a National Rail branch line. This, however, if it happens at all will be quite a long way in the future.
Bromley Town ward does essentially what it says on the tin. Bromley is the major shopping centre of outer south-east London though it includes other amenities including a theatre and a leisure centre. This part of the world includes some modest terraced streets and the odd smattering of council estate as well as some good quality owner-occupied larger houses and flats. Central Bromley has always had an opposition vote but has never been negligible for the Tories even in their worst years. This ward was somewhat half-heartedly on Labour's wish list for a time but the cudgels have instead been taken up by the Lib Dems, who came close to winning in 2018 and sealed the deal in 2022 by a comfortable margin, squeezing a portion but no means the majority of the Labour vote. Their top elected councillor Julie Ireland has been selected to contest the parliamentary seat too. This is a comeback to early 1990s glories for the Lib Dems, and they may take some beating in the ward in the future.
Completing the constituency and lying north and east of central Bromley are two contrasting wards, on their new boundaries Plaistow, and Bickley & Sundridge. Bickley is not superwealthy, but is almost totally owner-occupied, interwar and pretty prosperous. It is typical old-style safe Tory suburbia par excellence. It like some other parts of the constituency has a long history as a mighty Tory stronghold, often enjoying the highest percentage Tory vote in the whole borough. In the most recent ward boundary changes it has stretched north-westwards to take in Sundridge, also a well-to-do suburb with a large park complete with golf course. Sundridge gets a little less well-off the closer one gets to central Bromley, but it is certainly not poor and was always the most Tory part of the ward of which it was previously part, Plaistow & Sundridge. Plaistow is just to the north of Bromley itself, squeezed between it and the borough boundary with Lewisham. Both Plaistow & Bromley happen to have much more working-class namesakes in the east end of London, but Plaistow goes a little further towards sharing the Labour preferences of its namesake than does Bromley. Both are pronounced Plahstow although the Plai- element in the place name does refer to a place where one can play. This Plaistow is rather socially mixed, like Bromley tending to get a bit more prosperous the further north one gets even though that is taking you north towards the council estates of Downham over the borough boundary with Lewisham. Its southern parts however are relatively multiethnic by Bromley standards and have some traditional and not that heavily gentrified 19th-century small terraces. Labour came fairly but not very close to winning the former Plaistow & Sundridge ward in 2018, but the new ward shorn of Tory Sundridge proved more to their liking, and in the 2022 elections Plaistow as it was now more simply called was won narrowly but clearly outright by the party. This is the only Labour-held ward in the constituency, and if they are to upset the apple-cart and inflict a surprise defeat on the Tories this would be where they would need to pile up the votes as high as possible. This and Bromley Town are really the only wards with any sort of an inner-city characteristic, although it might be stretching a point to describe either of them in that way.
Although Bromley itself has a decent Labour heritage, along with Plaistow (though the latter has always been outvoted by Sundridge until 2022 when the two were finally separated for municipal purposes), the great majority of this constituency, built-up or otherwise, is traditionally very safe for the Tories. It has had one particularly well-known MP since WWII. When the votes of the 1945 general election were counted, there was a long wait for Forces votes to come in from the various parts of Europe and the world where British forces were stationed, and two MPs, both Conservatives, had actually died before they were declared elected in their constituencies. One was Sir Edward Campbell in Bromley. Harold Macmillan had been defeated, in retrospect hardly surprisingly, by Labour in Stockton-on-Tees, and in the sadly necessary by-election he obtained the Conservative nomination, and won. He rose to become Prime Minister in 1957 and led his party to its first postwar landslide victory in 1959, before troubles beset him and he retired abruptly from Parliament altogether as well as resigning from office in 1963. The Tories have held the seat and its linear successors ever since, and it has never been really close, except in the 2006 by-election that brought the present member, Sir Bob Neill, to Parliament, which was close to being a Liberal Democrat gain in what by this time was Bromley & Chislehurst. Labour, who were in government at the time, finished a humiliating fourth, behind UKIP's candidate, who was none other than Nigel Farage, although their heavily beaten candidate, Rachel Reeves, has gone on to aspire to high office in her capacity as Shadow Chancellor (her sister Ellie now represents territory very near here in Parliament). Since then, the Lib Dems suffered their post-coalition collapse, and latterly Labour has benefitted from the general improvement it has seen in its vote in so much of London, polling strongly enough in 2017 to reduce the Tory majority down to (just) four figures, and it did not rise sharply in 2019. In the light of recent opinion polls, the Tories would certainly have been worried about the Bromley & Chislehurst seat, but this major redrawing and concomitant renaming should ease their worries quite a lot, and the chances are that Sir Bob, who has decided to retire at the forthcoming election, will be able to hand the seat over safely to his Conservative successor even if it is a smaller majority than usual, and quite possibly a rather split opposition.
This new seat is geographically the central one in the London Borough of Bromley. It is quite a long thin seat stretching from entirely urban areas, some of which have at least a slight whiff of the inner city, in the north right down to some of the most rural areas to be found within Greater London, though neighbouring Orpington has always had such areas too. Biggin Hill, hard by the boundary with the county of Kent as it has been since the formation of the present-day London boroughs, and famous for its long-established small airport, is the most southerly outpost of Greater London of all, and is separated from the rest of the constituency by not only its airport to its north, but by actual farms and countryside. There are some very small villages included in this new seat, and one ward, Darwin (although only part of it is included in this seat), is in fact mostly rural. It is named after Charles Darwin who lived at Down House, although the village immediately to its north is nowadays spelt Downe. It is the home village of Reform UK's President, Nigel Farage, although his party is not particularly strong in this vicinity. This constituency can be regarded as a reasonably safe seat for the Conservatives, and has some very strong areas for that party. It is probably mostly true to say that the further north one goes, and the closest to Bromley, the more political variety is found, and both the Labour and Liberal Democrat Parties hold one ward in the constituency. Biggin Hill ward was years ago Liberal Democrat-held, but emphatically returned to its Conservative heritage for quite a long time; however, while it would be expected to vote comfortably Conservative in general elections, it is currently held by Independents on the council. The new boundaries appear to eliminate the possibility of a Labour gain which existed in the seat in its previous Bromley & Chislehurst incarnation, as the areas coming into this constituency do appear to be substantially more Conservative than the areas leaving it.
Biggin Hill and Darwin wards are the least urban element of the constituency. Biggin Hill is mostly owner-occupied and fairly prosperous but not extravagantly so. The villages are very pleasant if not quite idyllic. There is a little social housing in this part of the constituency but it is very much the minority. Essentially this is fairly standard-issue Tory territory even though in years gone by the Lib Dems were able to win in some rather surprising parts of the borough, having of course held the Orpington parliamentary seat for 8 years up to 1970. The Lib Dems have made a bit of a recovery in the borough of Bromley, but it has been patchy and there are no signs of it spreading into the more rural parts of it yet. This part of the constituency is expected to be the least troublesome for the Tories come the general election.
Two further wards to the north of these are right on the edge of the main built-up area of London; currently after boundary and in one case name changes they are called Bromley Common & Holwood, and Hayes & Coney Hall. The former ward has lost the name Keston from its name but much of Keston is still included, the Holwood estate (a country estate, not a council estate) lying just to its south-east. In the days when Bromley Common had its own more compact council ward, separated from Keston, it was at times competitive, with Labour winning clearly in its inaugural contest in 1964, but in 1971, although that was a particularly strong year in London overall, they had to be content to share the ward with the Conservatives, one of whose councillors was Simon Randall, later to become a major figure in the borough's politics. Labour have never been able to win ever since, although in 1974 one of their candidates was defeated by only four votes. There has been a tendency for Labour's vote to weaken in the Bromley community itself from the early days of the borough, and it is only in very recent years that it has shown gentle signs of revival. Once artisan or working-class cottages have been somewhat gentrified and this southern end of Bromley has become more prosperous than once it was. It did elect Alliance, then Lib Dem, councillors for a number of years and was seen as a stronghold for a time. They were cleared out by the Tories well before their wholesale collapse in much of the borough in 2014. Labour has since seen some revival of its support, and has now for the first time in years built up a coherent vote, its top candidate in 2022 losing by the modest but still clear margin of 477 votes to the bottom Tory. Some of the areas in Bromley itself included in the ward are of very high quality and built between the wars, but there are also many older & smaller houses. Hayes and Coney Hall ward (for a number of years this territory also included Keston in its ward) has an uninterrupted Tory heritage in Bromley council elections, including its linear predecessors. Even in their worst-ever Bromley elections of 1994 the Tories were still miles ahead in the then Hayes ward, their councillors including another very prominent figure in the borough's history, Dennis Barkway. The present Hayes & Coney Hall has given the Tories no trouble either, and can still be regarded as safely Conservative. However, Labour which is traditionally very weak in this area has belatedly started to accumulate a coherent vote, and one of its candidates in the 2022 managed to poll over 1500 votes, very high in what is a very heavily White, very prosperous, very owner-occupied and very outer-ring suburb. This is if anything an even more pleasant place to live than Bromley Common & Holwood, and it is surprising that the Tory majority has now been reduced to the merely comfortable rather than the super-safe. These two wards are mostly but not entirely (sub)urban, mostly but not entirely owner-occupied although there is a council estate element opposite Bromley Common, and comfortably but not overwhelmingly Conservative at present. There has been considerable talk of the Bakerloo Line being extended to Lewisham, and ultimately perhaps all the way to Hayes, which is currently the terminus of a National Rail branch line. This, however, if it happens at all will be quite a long way in the future.
Bromley Town ward does essentially what it says on the tin. Bromley is the major shopping centre of outer south-east London though it includes other amenities including a theatre and a leisure centre. This part of the world includes some modest terraced streets and the odd smattering of council estate as well as some good quality owner-occupied larger houses and flats. Central Bromley has always had an opposition vote but has never been negligible for the Tories even in their worst years. This ward was somewhat half-heartedly on Labour's wish list for a time but the cudgels have instead been taken up by the Lib Dems, who came close to winning in 2018 and sealed the deal in 2022 by a comfortable margin, squeezing a portion but no means the majority of the Labour vote. Their top elected councillor Julie Ireland has been selected to contest the parliamentary seat too. This is a comeback to early 1990s glories for the Lib Dems, and they may take some beating in the ward in the future.
Completing the constituency and lying north and east of central Bromley are two contrasting wards, on their new boundaries Plaistow, and Bickley & Sundridge. Bickley is not superwealthy, but is almost totally owner-occupied, interwar and pretty prosperous. It is typical old-style safe Tory suburbia par excellence. It like some other parts of the constituency has a long history as a mighty Tory stronghold, often enjoying the highest percentage Tory vote in the whole borough. In the most recent ward boundary changes it has stretched north-westwards to take in Sundridge, also a well-to-do suburb with a large park complete with golf course. Sundridge gets a little less well-off the closer one gets to central Bromley, but it is certainly not poor and was always the most Tory part of the ward of which it was previously part, Plaistow & Sundridge. Plaistow is just to the north of Bromley itself, squeezed between it and the borough boundary with Lewisham. Both Plaistow & Bromley happen to have much more working-class namesakes in the east end of London, but Plaistow goes a little further towards sharing the Labour preferences of its namesake than does Bromley. Both are pronounced Plahstow although the Plai- element in the place name does refer to a place where one can play. This Plaistow is rather socially mixed, like Bromley tending to get a bit more prosperous the further north one gets even though that is taking you north towards the council estates of Downham over the borough boundary with Lewisham. Its southern parts however are relatively multiethnic by Bromley standards and have some traditional and not that heavily gentrified 19th-century small terraces. Labour came fairly but not very close to winning the former Plaistow & Sundridge ward in 2018, but the new ward shorn of Tory Sundridge proved more to their liking, and in the 2022 elections Plaistow as it was now more simply called was won narrowly but clearly outright by the party. This is the only Labour-held ward in the constituency, and if they are to upset the apple-cart and inflict a surprise defeat on the Tories this would be where they would need to pile up the votes as high as possible. This and Bromley Town are really the only wards with any sort of an inner-city characteristic, although it might be stretching a point to describe either of them in that way.
Although Bromley itself has a decent Labour heritage, along with Plaistow (though the latter has always been outvoted by Sundridge until 2022 when the two were finally separated for municipal purposes), the great majority of this constituency, built-up or otherwise, is traditionally very safe for the Tories. It has had one particularly well-known MP since WWII. When the votes of the 1945 general election were counted, there was a long wait for Forces votes to come in from the various parts of Europe and the world where British forces were stationed, and two MPs, both Conservatives, had actually died before they were declared elected in their constituencies. One was Sir Edward Campbell in Bromley. Harold Macmillan had been defeated, in retrospect hardly surprisingly, by Labour in Stockton-on-Tees, and in the sadly necessary by-election he obtained the Conservative nomination, and won. He rose to become Prime Minister in 1957 and led his party to its first postwar landslide victory in 1959, before troubles beset him and he retired abruptly from Parliament altogether as well as resigning from office in 1963. The Tories have held the seat and its linear successors ever since, and it has never been really close, except in the 2006 by-election that brought the present member, Sir Bob Neill, to Parliament, which was close to being a Liberal Democrat gain in what by this time was Bromley & Chislehurst. Labour, who were in government at the time, finished a humiliating fourth, behind UKIP's candidate, who was none other than Nigel Farage, although their heavily beaten candidate, Rachel Reeves, has gone on to aspire to high office in her capacity as Shadow Chancellor (her sister Ellie now represents territory very near here in Parliament). Since then, the Lib Dems suffered their post-coalition collapse, and latterly Labour has benefitted from the general improvement it has seen in its vote in so much of London, polling strongly enough in 2017 to reduce the Tory majority down to (just) four figures, and it did not rise sharply in 2019. In the light of recent opinion polls, the Tories would certainly have been worried about the Bromley & Chislehurst seat, but this major redrawing and concomitant renaming should ease their worries quite a lot, and the chances are that Sir Bob, who has decided to retire at the forthcoming election, will be able to hand the seat over safely to his Conservative successor even if it is a smaller majority than usual, and quite possibly a rather split opposition.
