Croydon North

[The Bishop]

Apr 23, 2020 11:11:42 GMT johnloony said:

Croydon North is one of the safest Labour constituencies in the outer London boroughs, and is demographically an extension of the inner London boroughs to the north, such as Lambeth and Southwark. Until the 1980s, Croydon North was a marginal constituency, but substantial demographic change over a number of years - including a substantial increase in the BME population – has gradually changed it to become a very safe Labour constituency. The population is a mixture of approximately one third white, one third black and a quarter Asian. To the west of the constituency is the London Road area, with lots of Asian ethnic shops and food stores. In the heart of the constituency is Thornton Heath, which has a high proportion of black people. At the northern fringe of the constituency, up on the hills of Norbury and Upper Norwood, are more comfortable middle-class areas, which consistently elected Conservative councillors until the early 1990s. Even those wards have now gradually become safe for the Labour Party in local elections, even at the worst of times. All of the wards in Croydon North constituency will continue to elect Labour councillors with big majorities for the foreseeable future, and the constituency itself will continue to be a very safe Labour seat.

Its predecessor seats were marginal, but generally in the Tories favour. Presumably most of the old Croydon NW (with its famous 1981 byelection) went into this seat?

[Deleted]

Fun fact: Former Speaker of the House of Commons, Bernard Weatheril, represented Croydon North East. Interestingly, Labour and the SDP opposed him in 1987.

[johnloony]

Apr 23, 2020 12:08:00 GMT The Bishop said:

Apr 23, 2020 11:11:42 GMT johnloony said:

Croydon North is one of the safest Labour constituencies in the outer London boroughs, and is demographically an extension of the inner London boroughs to the north, such as Lambeth and Southwark. Until the 1980s, Croydon North was a marginal constituency, but substantial demographic change over a number of years - including a substantial increase in the BME population – has gradually changed it to become a very safe Labour constituency. The population is a mixture of approximately one third white, one third black and a quarter Asian. To the west of the constituency is the London Road area, with lots of Asian ethnic shops and food stores. In the heart of the constituency is Thornton Heath, which has a high proportion of black people. At the northern fringe of the constituency, up on the hills of Norbury and Upper Norwood, are more comfortable middle-class areas, which consistently elected Conservative councillors until the early 1990s. Even those wards have now gradually become safe for the Labour Party in local elections, even at the worst of times. All of the wards in Croydon North constituency will continue to elect Labour councillors with big majorities for the foreseeable future, and the constituency itself will continue to be a very safe Labour seat.

Its predecessor seats were marginal, but generally in the Tories favour. Presumably most of the old Croydon NW (with its famous 1981 byelection) went into this seat?

Yes - Croydon North contains the whole of the old Croydon NW, and just under half of the old Croydon NE.

[greenhert]

It is hard to believe that this seat was notionally Conservative (based on 1992 election results) upon its creation for the 1997 general election!

[londonseal80]

Apr 23, 2020 13:26:46 GMT greenhert said:

It is hard to believe that this seat was notionally Conservative (based on 1992 election results) upon its creation for the 1997 general election!

Labour were also wiped out here in 1982 and 1968 locals with Thornton Heath being a RA stronghold. That same ward in the two locals pre-coalition was actually just starting to get competitive for the Lib Dem’s anyone with local knowledge know what was the reason behind this?

[Deleted]

Apr 23, 2020 14:45:52 GMT @barnabymarder said:

John Major campaigned here in 1997 based on the notionals but it was clear he was wasting his time.

My friend Walter Wolfgang, who died last year, was the Labour candidate for Croydon NE in 1959 - the only time he stood for parliament. However, I still have one friend, in fact younger than Walter, who was a candidate in parliamentary elections in the 1950s.

John Major also campaigned in Luton South in 1997 iirc.

[Pete Whitehead]

Graham Bright had been John Major's PPS. Also Luton South had been the scene of the 'iconic' soap box in 1992, so there was probably sentimental reasons for campaigning there more than a strong belief the seat would be held

[martinwhelton]

The gain in Croydon North West back in 1992 by Labour had been assisted by the inclusion of Broad Green in 1983, and Upper Norwood moved to Croydon North East. It was expanded by taking in Upper Norwood and South Norwood(which went Labour for the first time in 1994) and Thornton Heath to form the current Croydon North. Although notionally Tory in 1992 it was only by 160 votes. If the old Croydon North East seat still existed it would be by now a very safe Labour seat.

[johnloony]

Apr 23, 2020 18:07:39 GMT londonseal80 said:

Apr 23, 2020 13:26:46 GMT greenhert said:

It is hard to believe that this seat was notionally Conservative (based on 1992 election results) upon its creation for the 1997 general election!

Labour were also wiped out here in 1982 and 1968 locals with Thornton Heath being a RA stronghold. That same ward in the two locals pre-coalition was actually just starting to get competitive for the Lib Dem’s anyone with local knowledge know what was the reason behind this?

Only that the Lib Dems targeted Thornton Heath for one particular local election, for no particular reason as far as I can tell. It was a blip, not a trend.

[Deleted]

Funnily enough the Conservatives got Councillors in South and Upper Norwood in 2006 but not Norbury.

[johnloony]

Apr 24, 2020 17:17:50 GMT @conservativeestimate said:

Funnily enough the Conservatives got Councillors in South and Upper Norwood in 2006 but not Norbury.

That was partly because Labour was heavily defending Norbury (thinking it was the most vulnerable marginal ward (which it was)) and did not make enough effort in U.N. and S.N. (thinking they were a bit safer (which they were)) whereas more efficient canvassing data told the Conservative Party that Norbury was out of reach and that U.N. and S.N. were worth trying. In other words, Labour was judging by previous election results, and Conservatives had more up-to-date detailed and accurate canvassing returns.

[Deleted]

Apr 24, 2020 18:29:01 GMT johnloony said:

Apr 24, 2020 17:17:50 GMT @conservativeestimate said:

Funnily enough the Conservatives got Councillors in South and Upper Norwood in 2006 but not Norbury.

That was partly because Labour was heavily defending Norbury (thinking it was the most vulnerable marginal ward (which it was)) and did not make enough effort in U.N. and S.N. (thinking they were a bit safer (which they were)) whereas more efficient canvassing data told the Conservative Party that Norbury was out of reach and that U.N. and S.N. were worth trying. In other words, Labour was judging by previous election results, and Conservatives had more up-to-date detailed and accurate canvassing returns.

Also worth noting that the Conservatives got councillors elected in those wards with roughly a third of the vote, that their vote share didn't increase by all that much, that the Greens did rather better in both wards in 2006 than either previously or since, and that the Liberal Democrats didn't stand in Upper Norwood that year.

That said, as somebody who has recently moved to the old South Norwood ward, I do find the idea that it had Conservative councillors as recently as a decade ago a bit surreal.

[londonseal80]

Apr 24, 2020 17:17:50 GMT @conservativeestimate said:

Funnily enough the Conservatives got Councillors in South and Upper Norwood in 2006 but not Norbury.

Not only that but both West Thornton and Bensham Manor were closer to being lost to the Conservatives than Norbury.

In neighbouring Merton St Helier and Ravensbury were marginally held by Labour. Though Longthornton which borders Norbury was marginal in 2002 but swing against the trend towards Labour in 2006.

[Pete Whitehead]

Apr 26, 2020 8:05:50 GMT londonseal80 said:

Apr 24, 2020 17:17:50 GMT @conservativeestimate said:

Funnily enough the Conservatives got Councillors in South and Upper Norwood in 2006 but not Norbury.

Not only that but both West Thornton and Bensham Manor were closer to being lost to the Conservatives than Norbury.

In neighbouring Merton St Helier and Ravensbury were marginally held by Labour. Though Longthornton which borders Norbury was marginal in 2002 but swing against the trend towards Labour in 2006.

I might be generalising a bit, but my impression is that South and Upper Norwood contain a lot of Edwardian villas and are the type of areas that started to deteriorate a bit in the 60s and 70s but saw subsequent gentrification from the 1990s. Norbury on the other hand contains much of the kind of inter-war suburbia which was strongly Conservative up to and including the 1980s but rapidly declined thereafter. There is a similar pattern in Streatham South (also largely inter-war in contrast with the wards further north) which transformed itself quite rapidly from the safest Conservative ward in Streatham to the safest Labour ward. As you say, Longthornton has followed a similar trajectory. This can also be seen in eg. Brent where Brondesbury has become a better Conservative area again compared with say Fryent. Of course the gentrification of areas like this is of only limited benefit to the Conservatives because it typically involves a lot of liberal metropolitan elitists like @benjamin , but at the margins it would have helped them in good years like 2006 and 2008, whereas areas like Norbury were continuing their descent down the social scale.

[Deleted]

I'm flattered by the suggestion that my presence is raising the social status of the constituency.

[Andrew_S]

Apr 26, 2020 19:35:37 GMT @benjamin said:

I'm flattered by the suggestion that my presence is raising the social status of the constituency.

Every little helps.

[johnloony]

Apr 24, 2020 19:11:32 GMT @benjamin said:

Apr 24, 2020 18:29:01 GMT johnloony said:

That was partly because Labour was heavily defending Norbury (thinking it was the most vulnerable marginal ward (which it was)) and did not make enough effort in U.N. and S.N. (thinking they were a bit safer (which they were)) whereas more efficient canvassing data told the Conservative Party that Norbury was out of reach and that U.N. and S.N. were worth trying. In other words, Labour was judging by previous election results, and Conservatives had more up-to-date detailed and accurate canvassing returns.

Also worth noting that the Conservatives got councillors elected in those wards with roughly a third of the vote, that their vote share didn't increase by all that much, that the Greens did rather better in both wards in 2006 than either previously or since, and that the Liberal Democrats didn't stand in Upper Norwood that year.

That said, as somebody who has recently moved to the old South Norwood ward, I do find the idea that it had Conservative councillors as recently as a decade ago a bit surreal.

Upper Norwood and South Norwood wards were safe Conservative until the 1980s, and only even marginal from the 1980s onwards. When Labour won a majority in Croydon Council for the first time in 1994, they did so by gaining U.N., S.N., and Norbury wards, and some of the Conservative councillors who lost their seats had served for decades.

[Robert Waller]

Hope someone might do a complete profile of this interesting seat.


2011 Census

Age 65+ 9.7% 616/650
Owner-occupied 50.6% 575/650
Private rented 26.5% 59/650
Social rented 20.0% 220/650
White 35.2% 643/650
Black 31.5% 2/650
Asian 23.4% 37/650
Passports held Africa 4.8% 9/650
Managerial & professional 28.4%
Routine & Semi-routine 21.3%
Degree level 30.5% 170/650
No qualifications 17.8% 544/650
Students 12.1% 98/650


I think that these demographics have changed more than any other seat since I started doing the Almanac in 1983. Looking back at the 1st print edition, I see that in addition to the changes in ethnicity, in the 1981 Census both Croydon NW and NE were just over 63% owner occupied ... (at that time I suspect many of us thought that percentage would just keep rising!)

2021 Census

Owner occupied 48.4% 509/573
Private rented 31.3% 58/573
Social rented 20.4% 146/573
White 34.1%
Black 30.9%
Asian 22.1%
Managerial & professional 30.5% 331/573
Routine & Semi-routine 21.4% 377/573
Degree level 39.8% 108/573
No qualifications 18.0% 275/573





General Election 2019: Croydon North

Party Candidate Votes % ±%

Labour Steve Reed 36,495 65.6 -8.6
Conservative Donald Ekekhomen 11,822 21.3 +1.4
Liberal Democrats Claire Bonham 4,476 8.0 +5.2
Green Rachel Chance 1,629 2.9 +1.3
Brexit Party Chidi Ngwaba 839 1.5 New
CPA Candace Mitchell 348 0.6 New

Lab Majority 24,673 44.4 -10.0

Turnout 55,609 62.9 -5.3

Registered electors 88,466

Labour hold

Swing 5.0 Lab to C

[Robert Waller]

Given what I said in the above post, and that still no one has come forward, and that this is the final London seat without a full profile .... if by the end of the day another contributor has not committed to do this immediately, I shall undertake to do it myself within my next couple!

[Robert Waller]

The demographic statistics relating to the neighbourhoods of South London now included in the Croydon North constituency must have changed more than any other seat since the first print edition of the Almanac in 1983. Looking back, the ‘Black/Asian’ percentages in the seats - Croydon NW and NE – that were its predecessors amounted to 23% and 14% respectively. By the time of the 2011 Census, Croydon North was only 35% white, and the Black and Asian figures added up to 55% - and these will have increased over the next eleven years. The Black percentage in 2011 was the 2nd highest of any of the 650 constituencies. The mixed race proportion was the 3rd highest. In addition to the changes in ethnicity, in the 1981 Census both Croydon NW and NE were just over 63% owner occupied and at that time I suspect many observers thought that percentage would just keep rising. Yet by 2011 it had actually dropped to barely over half of the total, 50.6%.This was not due to an increase in the social rented sector, which remained at around 20%. But the private rented sector reached over 26%, in the top decile among all UK seats.

These social and housing transformations, not surprisingly, have been matched by a dramatic long term swing in electoral preference. The work of the boundary review which commenced in 1991, reported in 1995, and came into force at the 1997 general election essentially reduced the number of seats allocated to the London Borough of Croydon from four to three. The newly constituted Croydon North included the whole of the former Croydon NW plus three wards from NE. In 1981, North West had been gained by the Liberal Bill Pitt in a parliamentary byelection – and that was from the Conservatives, who actually regained it in 1983 and held it in 1987, before Malcolm Wicks gained it for Labour in 1992, by just 1,526 votes from the Tory incumbent Humfrey Malins. Croydon North East had in effect been won by the Conservatives throughout is existence from 1955 to 1997, although from 1983-92 its MP Bernard Weatherill had served as Speaker of the Commons (but was opposed by Labour and SDP candidates in the 1987 election). This means that ‘notionally’ the new Croydon North is estimated to have had a small Conservative majority if it had existed in 1992, which means that in effect Malcolm Wicks’s victory in 1997 counted as a Labour gain. By his last election in 2010 Wicks’s majority had increased to over 16,000. That of his successor Steve Reed - first elected in 2012 following Malcolm Wicks’s death, over a distinguished field of 12 candidates in which our own John Loony finished in the top ten - increased to no less than 32,365 in 2017 and was still well over 24,000 in 2019.

In May 2022 Labour did not do well in the Croydon local elections, following mismanagement in a number of key fields such as housing and child services, and lost control of the council, being reduced from 41 to 34 councillors, as well as being defeated by the Conservatives in the mayoral contest. Yet they still won every ward which lies wholly within the boundaries of the North constituency (some parts of the Fairfield and Waddon wards are included due to local government boundary changes since the last parliamentary review to come into effect, and the Greens and Conservatives made partial gains in those wards in 2022).

The segments of North in those two wards (that in Fairfield is very small) represent the part of the constituency closest to the centre of Croydon, with its almost American-style urban canyons between high rise office buildings. Moving to the north-west roughly along the A23 road towards central London, we pass beyond Broad Green to find Thornton Heath (also including Bensham Manor and West Thornton wards) and then Norbury, also divided, in its case into two wards: Norbury Park and Norbury & Pollards Hill. These neighbourhoods have all become substantially occupied by Black and Asian residents over the decades. Broad Green (33%) and West Thornton are more Asian (36% in 2011), but Bensham Manor was 36% Black. Moving north east from the centre we find Selhurst ward, also strongly Black – though Selhurst Park, the ground of the Premier League football club Crystal Palace, is actually in South Norwood ward.

Proceeding further in towards the centre of London in the north-east of Croydon North we move on, and up, towards the actual Crystal Palace, to the hilly Norwood neighbourhoods – South Norwood and Upper Norwood are in this seat. Norwood (once the Great North Wood, an ancient oak forest) was developed for housing in the Victorian period, due to the construction of transport links such as the London & Croydon Railway (Norwood station, 1846, was originally called the Jolly Sailor, 1839). It was more ‘black-coated’ suburbia than working class. Arthur Conan Doyle lived in South Norwood between 1891 and 1894 and wrote a Sherlock Holmes story, The Adventure of the Norwood Builder, which appeared in 1903. By this time there had been plenty of building in the Norwoods. In recent decades, though, in more work for builders, many of the large older houses have been redeveloped or broken down from owner occupation to rented multi-occupancy, which helps to account for that dramatic change in housing tenure affecting the Croydon North constituency

Unlike the Norwood neigbourhoods, the Norbury area is typified by more consistently 20th century developments. Norbury only had a population of 475 in 1901, and the first suburban neighbourhood to be developed was the LCC Norbury Cottage Garden Estate. But most of this part of the seat clearly belongs to London’s massive ‘metroland’ type inter-war semi-detached expansion. Perhaps Norbury’s most famous son is the novelist and academic Kingsley Amis; but his political transition went in the opposite direction from Norbury itself – he started out as a Labour supporter but moved to the Right in middle and old age. Norbury was overwhelmingly Conservative in local elections right up till 1990, when for the first time a single Labour candidate broke the monopoly.

The whole story of Croydon North seems to be one of reversal. There was initial population loss that led to Croydon’s reduction from four seats to three in 1983; for example the electorate of Croydon NW, the core constituency here, declined from 59,575 in its first contest in 1955 to 57,241 in its last in 1987 – and that despite the lowering of the voting age from 21 to 18 before the 1970 election. However, with a population becoming steadily younger on average, that of Croydon North has steadily increased, from 77,000 in 1997 to 88,466 in 2019. It looks like that will be it last appearance in its present form, as the Boundary Commission has provisionally recommended a pretty even split, with 56% of the present seat going into a new Croydon North which will also include electors from Croydon Central (such as the rest of Fairfield ward), Croydon South (most of the rest of Waddon) and even from Mitcham & Morden in Merton borough, in the form of Longthornton.

Meanwhile, 44% of the current Croydon North will form the majority of a new and additional, and also cross-borough, Norwood division, together with about a quarter of Dulwich & West Norwood (Knights Hill and Gypsy Hill) and about a seventh of Croydon Central (Woodside ward). This will recreate the name at least of a Norwood division that existed all the way from 1885 to 1997, though it was essentially within the bounds of what became the London Borough of Lambeth in 1965. That Norwood was won 21 times by the Conservative and Unionist party, and only by Labour in 1945 then from 1966 onwards, often narrowly (though clearly benefiting from long term political and demographic change). However the new seat will be safely Labour, starting its life with a notional 2019 Labour majority of around 20,000. There is no mystery for a Sherlock Holmes to unravel in its future political preferences. The Labour lead in the reduced Croydon North would be similarly massive – and this, remember based on votes cast in one of Labour’s worst ever general election results. These electoral statistics reflect and accompany those demographic developments with which we started: this may be the part of England that has most changed in political and electoral terms in the four decades covered by successive incarnations of this ‘Almanac’.


2011 Census

Age 65+ 9.7% 616/650
Age 0-15 23.4% 21/650
Lone parent with dependent children 14.5% 5/650
Owner-occupied 50.6% 575/650
Private rented 26.5% 59/650
Social rented 20.0% 220/650
White 35.2% 643/650
White British 26.0%
Mixed/multiple ethnic groups 7.6% 3/650
Black 31.5% 2/650
Asian 23.4% 37/650
Passports held Africa 4.8% 9/650
Managerial & professional 28.4%
Routine & Semi-routine 21.3%
Degree level 30.5% 170/650
No qualifications 17.8% 544/650
Students 12.1% 98/650

(slightly expanded stats compared with above post)

2019 general election result to be found above.

Profile offered as no one else took up the invitation ...

Will at least help with the list of John Chanin