Post by bsjmcr on Jun 7, 2020 3:49:53 GMT
At first glance it would seem like this is another flat fertile fenland, an impregnable Tory stronghold made of leave-leaning farmers, as with the other (insert compass point) Cambridgeshire seats, but this is quite an exceptional area, and it can no longer be considered a Tory stronghold despite its rural nature.
As rural as it is, this is very much ‘Greater Cambridge’ and home to many of the university’s staff and a handful of students (by virtue of inclusion of a Cambridge city ward and Girton College), this may reflect the more recent voting patterns. It voted 61% remain, not far off the 75% of the city, and a world away from the comfortable Leave leads in nearby Huntingdon, Fenland and Peterborough, while next-door East Cambs leaned leave too. As such, the Tory majority was trimmed from 16,000 right down to less than 3,000 votes, unprecedented for this constituency, equally so was the remarkable Lib Dem surge Jo Swinson could only dream of, jumping from 3rd place to pile up over 28,000 votes. To be fair the Lib Dems had always been runners-up since the seat’s 1997 creation, except in 2017, but their second place vote has never been consolidated to this level, and a split opposition has always given the illusion of it being an super-safe Tory stronghold, indeed, it was 2010, not 1997, which previously delivered this seat’s smallest majority, at less than 8,000. ’97 saw an incredibly equal split between Lib Dems and Labour. As for next time, 8,000 Labour votes still remain up for grabs by the Lib Dems and this will be one to watch to see if it will deliver a gold patch in a sea of blue, next to a bright red dot in Cambridge where the Lib Dems have run out of steam.
This is an area of high turnouts and high education. It is probably one of a minority of seats where the majority of residents are degree-educated, at almost 60%, equally, the proportion of professionals and managers is also 60%. There is practically no deprivation in this area, and jobseekers are as hard to find as needles in any of the haystacks that can be found on the farms here. Indeed, it may have lowest proportion of unemployment benefit claimants nationally at less than 1%. The Council also regularly ranks in the top 10 places to live in the country. Fervently a middle class area, as well as University staff and a few farmers it must play host to staff of the booming research and technology institutes springing up in West Cambridge, as well as the important Addenbrooke’s hospital which is in this seat, and potentially even London commuters, Cambridge being an hour’s train away and some of the villages even have their own train stations.
Most of the residents here are spread across many villages, too many to list here, but the biggest settlement here is actually Cambourne, which didn’t exist a quarter of a century ago - look on any old satellite image and all you will see is a field. Its population has now swelled to over 8,000, made up of the usual identikit noughties era houses, mostly detached, with more to come. It is more than just a housing estate however, but an established village now with supermarket, pub, hotel, primary school, church, and the headquarters of the district council - a rather large businesslike complex, not your typical town hall. The council was previously based in Cambridge proper, outside the district itself! Cambourne does suffer from its relative isolation from Cambridge, having relatively poor transport links - no train, either a car down the A428 or a normal bus service. The controversial Cambridge-St Ives guided busway, which cuts through the constituency and is the longest such busway in the world, goes nowhere near Cambourne. And for a city which cycles so much, there is no dedicated cycle lane either.
Of course the image of Cambourne is nowhere near representative of the constituency, the rest of which is made of picturesque villages dotted about the fens. There is attractive countryside here, no hills, but the odd windmill, golden fields of oilseed rape in spring and nature reserves throughout. Grantchester is one such village, just south-west of Cambridge, the boundary with the City being the River Cam. Like most of the villages here, thatched roof cottages, quaint pubs, ancient chuches and village halls are the order of the day. A notable former resident of Grantchester is the war poet Rupert Brooke, whose former house, the old vicarage, is now home to a certain Lord and Lady Archer. Songs have been sung about the village and its idyllic meadows (by Pink Floyd), and it claims to have the highest per capita proportion of Nobel Prize winners in the world, being such a desirable settlement just a stone’s throw away from that citadel of learning. Nearby is Byron’s Pool, where the poet Lord Byron used to take a swim while he was a student.
Other villages include the Shelfords, there being a Little and a Great Shelford. The latter became famous for having links to the ancestors of President Obama. Madingley is home to the university’s ‘Institute for Continuing Education’ (not a college, but a department delivering short courses and certificates to people who can afford them) at the beautiful Madingley Hall, a former stately home compete with Capability Brown gardens and rented by Queen Victoria for her son Edward VII to live in while he was a student at Cambridge - rather nice student accommodation if you can get it!
One of the larger villages is Sawston, population 7,000, it has its own stately home, and here the demographics are ever so slightly more mixed, having a touch lower proportion of graduates (though they still outweigh those without qualifications) and professionals. Gamlingay and Bassingbourn towards the south-western Hertfordshire border with Royston are also similar, though are smaller, with 3,000 people each. Bassingbourn is home to a MoD barracks, formerly an RAF airfield, which became controversial in 2014 due to incidents involving Libyan cadets. The barracks closed and reopened in 2018. Cottenham to the north of Cambridge has 6,000 residents and is generally affluent and is sprawling out.
As such, the constituency is currently too large, population continuing to grow, with new builds springing up here and there, including in the Girton area. Girton is actually a village in itself that the somewhat isolated Cambridge college is named after, its distance being the butt of all jokes amongst students. Opened in 1869 as the first women’s college, it was also the first to go mixed in 1976, and made of attractive redbrick, giving a sort of ‘boarding school’ look, set in swathes of fields and orchards. Just down the road is one of the hubs of population growth at Eddington, half of which is in this constituency and half in the city. Even on current Google Maps it is still a field. The futuristic development opened in 2017 and will house 3,000 residents - staff, students and recent graduates, is mostly made of apartments including an accommodation annexe of Girton College, and aims to be sustainable and a settlement in itself, having its own supermarket and primary school. It also has a unique underground waste collection system - you won’t find a single wheelie bin there.
The Cambridge ward included here is Queen Edith’s, which includes Addenbrooke’s hospital as said, and Homerton College. It is next to the Education Department and as such was a teacher training college for most of its history, only relatively recently taking on all students, becoming the largest college by total number (that’s right, it isn’t Trinity, which only has the most undergrads). The ward is one of the if not the most affluent and middle-class ones in the city, and on the ground it is odd that it has always been sloughed off the city’s seat, for there is little buffer between it and the city, just a matter of making up numbers. On the City Council Queen Edith's is safely Lib Dem (other than shock Labour victories in 2012 and 14 during the LD's nadir). The South Cambs District elections of 2018 also saw the Tories rejected in most of the villages, the Lib Dems being the main beneficiary, and in some cases Independents and Labour in Cambourne and Bassingbourn.
The student vote here historically has been vastly outweighed by the affluent village Tory vote. Now that much of the latter are moving away from the Tories over Brexit, student registration here could make all the difference for the first time ever, truly a sign of the times.
Andrew Lansley held the seat for the Tories in 1997 right up to 2015, during which he was Health Secretary. He didn’t appear to be local at first, didn't go to Cambridge, but seemed to do well here and is now Lord Lansley of Orwell - named after yet another one of the villages, not the author! Heidi Allen took over in 2015 with a vast majority due to the Lib Dem evaporation and over 50% of the vote, something Lansley did not manage during his time. She too was not local or educated locally, but was a Councillor in nearby (?) St Albans. Perhaps her tenure was the most colourful in this seat’s history. One of the founders of and leader of Change UK, after their disappointment at the EU elections she sat as an independent, then as ‘The Independents’, and finally as a Lib Dem, before standing down. Who knows if she stood again as a Lib Dem she could have carried a personal vote and held on.
Former journalist, later Johnson advisor (when he was Mayor) and banker’s association head, Anthony Browne clung on for the Conservatives last year. He was born, raised and educated locally, an alumnus of Trinity Hall college. Some of the more right-wing articles he wrote in his journalist days were unearthed and criticised during the election, for which he has apologised, but recently he hasn’t done much further to endear his remainy constituents with his fervent backing of Cummings after that trip to Durham. Time will tell if these highly educated constituents will remember this at the ballot box next time around.
As rural as it is, this is very much ‘Greater Cambridge’ and home to many of the university’s staff and a handful of students (by virtue of inclusion of a Cambridge city ward and Girton College), this may reflect the more recent voting patterns. It voted 61% remain, not far off the 75% of the city, and a world away from the comfortable Leave leads in nearby Huntingdon, Fenland and Peterborough, while next-door East Cambs leaned leave too. As such, the Tory majority was trimmed from 16,000 right down to less than 3,000 votes, unprecedented for this constituency, equally so was the remarkable Lib Dem surge Jo Swinson could only dream of, jumping from 3rd place to pile up over 28,000 votes. To be fair the Lib Dems had always been runners-up since the seat’s 1997 creation, except in 2017, but their second place vote has never been consolidated to this level, and a split opposition has always given the illusion of it being an super-safe Tory stronghold, indeed, it was 2010, not 1997, which previously delivered this seat’s smallest majority, at less than 8,000. ’97 saw an incredibly equal split between Lib Dems and Labour. As for next time, 8,000 Labour votes still remain up for grabs by the Lib Dems and this will be one to watch to see if it will deliver a gold patch in a sea of blue, next to a bright red dot in Cambridge where the Lib Dems have run out of steam.
This is an area of high turnouts and high education. It is probably one of a minority of seats where the majority of residents are degree-educated, at almost 60%, equally, the proportion of professionals and managers is also 60%. There is practically no deprivation in this area, and jobseekers are as hard to find as needles in any of the haystacks that can be found on the farms here. Indeed, it may have lowest proportion of unemployment benefit claimants nationally at less than 1%. The Council also regularly ranks in the top 10 places to live in the country. Fervently a middle class area, as well as University staff and a few farmers it must play host to staff of the booming research and technology institutes springing up in West Cambridge, as well as the important Addenbrooke’s hospital which is in this seat, and potentially even London commuters, Cambridge being an hour’s train away and some of the villages even have their own train stations.
Most of the residents here are spread across many villages, too many to list here, but the biggest settlement here is actually Cambourne, which didn’t exist a quarter of a century ago - look on any old satellite image and all you will see is a field. Its population has now swelled to over 8,000, made up of the usual identikit noughties era houses, mostly detached, with more to come. It is more than just a housing estate however, but an established village now with supermarket, pub, hotel, primary school, church, and the headquarters of the district council - a rather large businesslike complex, not your typical town hall. The council was previously based in Cambridge proper, outside the district itself! Cambourne does suffer from its relative isolation from Cambridge, having relatively poor transport links - no train, either a car down the A428 or a normal bus service. The controversial Cambridge-St Ives guided busway, which cuts through the constituency and is the longest such busway in the world, goes nowhere near Cambourne. And for a city which cycles so much, there is no dedicated cycle lane either.
Of course the image of Cambourne is nowhere near representative of the constituency, the rest of which is made of picturesque villages dotted about the fens. There is attractive countryside here, no hills, but the odd windmill, golden fields of oilseed rape in spring and nature reserves throughout. Grantchester is one such village, just south-west of Cambridge, the boundary with the City being the River Cam. Like most of the villages here, thatched roof cottages, quaint pubs, ancient chuches and village halls are the order of the day. A notable former resident of Grantchester is the war poet Rupert Brooke, whose former house, the old vicarage, is now home to a certain Lord and Lady Archer. Songs have been sung about the village and its idyllic meadows (by Pink Floyd), and it claims to have the highest per capita proportion of Nobel Prize winners in the world, being such a desirable settlement just a stone’s throw away from that citadel of learning. Nearby is Byron’s Pool, where the poet Lord Byron used to take a swim while he was a student.
Other villages include the Shelfords, there being a Little and a Great Shelford. The latter became famous for having links to the ancestors of President Obama. Madingley is home to the university’s ‘Institute for Continuing Education’ (not a college, but a department delivering short courses and certificates to people who can afford them) at the beautiful Madingley Hall, a former stately home compete with Capability Brown gardens and rented by Queen Victoria for her son Edward VII to live in while he was a student at Cambridge - rather nice student accommodation if you can get it!
One of the larger villages is Sawston, population 7,000, it has its own stately home, and here the demographics are ever so slightly more mixed, having a touch lower proportion of graduates (though they still outweigh those without qualifications) and professionals. Gamlingay and Bassingbourn towards the south-western Hertfordshire border with Royston are also similar, though are smaller, with 3,000 people each. Bassingbourn is home to a MoD barracks, formerly an RAF airfield, which became controversial in 2014 due to incidents involving Libyan cadets. The barracks closed and reopened in 2018. Cottenham to the north of Cambridge has 6,000 residents and is generally affluent and is sprawling out.
As such, the constituency is currently too large, population continuing to grow, with new builds springing up here and there, including in the Girton area. Girton is actually a village in itself that the somewhat isolated Cambridge college is named after, its distance being the butt of all jokes amongst students. Opened in 1869 as the first women’s college, it was also the first to go mixed in 1976, and made of attractive redbrick, giving a sort of ‘boarding school’ look, set in swathes of fields and orchards. Just down the road is one of the hubs of population growth at Eddington, half of which is in this constituency and half in the city. Even on current Google Maps it is still a field. The futuristic development opened in 2017 and will house 3,000 residents - staff, students and recent graduates, is mostly made of apartments including an accommodation annexe of Girton College, and aims to be sustainable and a settlement in itself, having its own supermarket and primary school. It also has a unique underground waste collection system - you won’t find a single wheelie bin there.
The Cambridge ward included here is Queen Edith’s, which includes Addenbrooke’s hospital as said, and Homerton College. It is next to the Education Department and as such was a teacher training college for most of its history, only relatively recently taking on all students, becoming the largest college by total number (that’s right, it isn’t Trinity, which only has the most undergrads). The ward is one of the if not the most affluent and middle-class ones in the city, and on the ground it is odd that it has always been sloughed off the city’s seat, for there is little buffer between it and the city, just a matter of making up numbers. On the City Council Queen Edith's is safely Lib Dem (other than shock Labour victories in 2012 and 14 during the LD's nadir). The South Cambs District elections of 2018 also saw the Tories rejected in most of the villages, the Lib Dems being the main beneficiary, and in some cases Independents and Labour in Cambourne and Bassingbourn.
The student vote here historically has been vastly outweighed by the affluent village Tory vote. Now that much of the latter are moving away from the Tories over Brexit, student registration here could make all the difference for the first time ever, truly a sign of the times.
Andrew Lansley held the seat for the Tories in 1997 right up to 2015, during which he was Health Secretary. He didn’t appear to be local at first, didn't go to Cambridge, but seemed to do well here and is now Lord Lansley of Orwell - named after yet another one of the villages, not the author! Heidi Allen took over in 2015 with a vast majority due to the Lib Dem evaporation and over 50% of the vote, something Lansley did not manage during his time. She too was not local or educated locally, but was a Councillor in nearby (?) St Albans. Perhaps her tenure was the most colourful in this seat’s history. One of the founders of and leader of Change UK, after their disappointment at the EU elections she sat as an independent, then as ‘The Independents’, and finally as a Lib Dem, before standing down. Who knows if she stood again as a Lib Dem she could have carried a personal vote and held on.
Former journalist, later Johnson advisor (when he was Mayor) and banker’s association head, Anthony Browne clung on for the Conservatives last year. He was born, raised and educated locally, an alumnus of Trinity Hall college. Some of the more right-wing articles he wrote in his journalist days were unearthed and criticised during the election, for which he has apologised, but recently he hasn’t done much further to endear his remainy constituents with his fervent backing of Cummings after that trip to Durham. Time will tell if these highly educated constituents will remember this at the ballot box next time around.
