2023 Review - South East

[Pete Whitehead]

Evidently the solution is to split Newbury and Thatcham..



You can swap Loddon for Hawkedon which might look slightly better

[Pete Whitehead]

I don't think either Reading incumbent is going to care much for that plan. Maybe they can swap?

[East Anglian Lefty]

Jan 19, 2021 16:47:00 GMT Pete Whitehead said:

Evidently the solution is to split Newbury and Thatcham..



You can swap Loddon for Hawkedon which might look slightly better

That's very far from great, but it does rise to the level of 'better than Mersey Banks' so it does put us in the range of seats the BCE might actually draw. I'm impressed.

[mattb]

OK I couldn't resist. Just for fun - some odd seats here!

Newbury 71645
Tilehurst & Lambourn 69985
Reading C 71283
Reading burbs 70083
Wokingham 70235
Maidenhead 70589
Bracknell 70247
Slough & Old Windsor 70000
E Berks 71070
Aldershot 76765
Basingstoke 71278
NE Hants 76325
NW Hants 76603
Winchester 76301
Alton 75227
Petersfield 75518
Eastleigh N & Romsey 76972
Eastleigh S & Hamble 76876
Southampton Test 76000
Southampton Itchen 72777
Fareham 72797
Gasport 73763
Portsmouth S 74253
Portsmouth N 76634
Havant 75264
New Forest W 75590
New Forest E 74178

[Pete Whitehead]

As they say - 'just a bit of fun'

[islington]

Also in a spirit of 'better than Silchester Mersey Banks', I think I've now got this to a point where I'm willing to put it forward as a serious suggestion. (prepares to duck)

Aldershot - 76765. As we've seen it before. We all know about Yateley.

North Hampshire - 76325. This keeps Fleet and Church Crookham together but it does stretch a long way west.

Basingstoke - 71278. If preferred Chineham and Sherborne St John wards can be swapped with the preceding seat.

Alton - 76857. I'm not unhappy with this, although I did spend some time swapping wards with North Hampshire to try to make the latter more compact. In principle a 'Fleet and Alton' seat might be attractive but I couldn't get it to work.

West Hampshire - 76983. The successor to NW Hants but it loses its eastern parts and extends much further south.

Winchester - 76831. I'm particularly happy with this one: the whole of Winchester district less three wards in the south.

East Hampshire - 74915. The southern half of the current seat, plus all but one of the non-Winchester wards of Meon Valley. Could be 'Petersfield'.

Havant - 75264. The current seat plus one ward from Meon Valley.

Portsmouth North - 76634. With thanks to EAL for this one. Adding Southwick to the existing Portsmouth N seat won't be popular, but neither will a Berks-Hants cross-county seat. Something has to give somewhere.

Portsmouth South - 74253. Unchanged.

Gosport - 73763. Unchanged.

Fareham - 72797. Loses Sarisbury but otherwise unchanged.

Bishop's Waltham - 74060. More or less the successor to Eastleigh. I'm far from sure what to call it because it lacks any obvious focal point, but even so it's a good compact seat.

Southampton Itchen - 75393. Not an unreasonable seat in itself; the ward borrowed from Eastleigh is a good fit.

Southampton North and Eastleigh - 76877.

Southampton Test and Romsey - 74358.

New Forest East - 74178.

New Forest West - 75590. The current seat plus one ward.

[East Anglian Lefty]

This isn't the worst thing in the world:



New Forest W 75590 - gains Boldre
Romsey 74946 - a bad seat, but if you ignore the fact that it takes in some newly-built extensions of Winchester then it's sort of OK?
Southampton W & Waterside 75440 - this is the key, because it gives you a relatively neat way to push up the electorate of Southampton's seats
Southampton Test 74314 - still just about borders the Test Estuary
Southampton Itchen 72150 - unchanged
Eastleigh 75868 - a neater split than I'd anticipated
Solent 76902 - western Fareham, Hedge End et al., but there isn't really a sensible name for this
Gosport 73763 - unchanged
Portsmouth South 74253 - unchanged
Portsmouth North 71844 - unchanged
Fareham & Waterlooville 77036 - incoherent, but keeps the eponymous areas together insofar as ward boundaries allow
Havant 72766 - unchanged
Winchester & Horndean 76849 - there's been a Winchester constituency since 1295 and it seems a shame to get rid of the name in return for this rather silly seat
East Hampshire 76943 - unchanged
NW Hampshire 76155 - cuts a little too close to the edges of Andover for my liking, but it'll do
Basingstoke 76948 - yes, Bramley doesn't work here
NE Hampshire 74589 - if you alter East Hampshire, you can probably avoid splitting Yateley, but I don't care enough about Yateley to investigate
Aldershot 76765 - gains Yateley East

[YL]

I prefer "Silchester" to those contortions around Portsmouth and Southampton, I'm afraid. Also, as far as the definition of "county" used by the BCE is concerned Portsmouth and Southampton, like other non-Berkshire unitaries, are counties in their own right, so those contortions are actually cross-county seats too.

(Aimed at islington's plan, not EAL's, which was posted while I was writing it.)

[Pete Whitehead]

Winchester seems to get linked with a different town at every review and has been linked with a large number of different towns in Hampshire over the decades, but Winchester & Horndean is something I never imagined I'd see

[bjornhattan]

I really like the Waterside and Southampton West combination - Totton in particular works well with Redbridge/Millbrook and surrounds. But I don't like the fact it leads to somewhere like Brockenhurst ending up in that monstrous Romsey seat which stretches to Alresford.

I'm having a play myself, but it looks like you can get quite a sensible solution if you split the Waterside area. Marchwood and points south can go in a reasonably compact seat with Romsey but without any rural areas beyond North Baddesley or Mid-Test, while Totton can go in with western Southampton. I'm still working on it, and there could be horrific knock-on effects elsewhere, but it could be a decent option.

[islington]

EAL's Southampton is better than mine and his Basingstoke is ingenious.

I'm still tweaking my plan to try to produce a more consolidated Southampton. At the moment I have two recognizable Test and Itchen seats, each comprising seven So'ton wards with one non-So'ton ward added in (meaning that the city as a whole has two wards swapped out, the same number as at present).

I'm increasingly confident that an acceptable 18-seat solution for Hampshire is waiting to be found.

[East Anglian Lefty]

Jan 19, 2021 19:30:15 GMT bjornhattan said:

I really like the Waterside and Southampton West combination - Totton in particular works well with Redbridge/Millbrook and surrounds. But I don't like the fact it leads to somewhere like Brockenhurst ending up in that monstrous Romsey seat which stretches to Alresford.

I'm having a play myself, but it looks like you can get quite a sensible solution if you split the Waterside area. Marchwood and points south can go in a reasonably compact seat with Romsey but without any rural areas beyond North Baddesley or Mid-Test, while Totton can go in with western Southampton. I'm still working on it, and there could be horrific knock-on effects elsewhere, but it could be a decent option.

This was a good steer. Here's a tweak (north Hampshire and everything I haven't mentioned is the same as my last map):



West Hampshire 73913 - this is not the compact seat based on Romsey requested, but the Test Valley has to go somewhere
Romsey and Southampton West 75212
Southampton Test 72355
Southampton Itchen 76202 - includes one ward from Eastleigh. Not wild about having two seats crossing the boundary, but it's one of the less disruptive ways to do so
Eastleigh 76529 - minimum change
Fareham 75198 - this looks bad, but it's not as bad as my first draft, 'Horndean and Sarisbury'
Havant & Horndean 75304 - swaps Purbrook and Stakes for Horndean
Portchester & Waterlooville 76419 - the best I could do without ward splits
Winchester 74939 - unchanged

[YL]

Jan 19, 2021 10:27:02 GMT Pete Whitehead said:

The Banstead area is a bit of a mess in some of these plans (taking Banstead to include basically the five northern wards of Reigate & Banstead - this is split between three different seats)

If you don't like that it's possible to restore the existing boundary (except for a slight ward realignment) with the bits currently in Reigate going into Leatherhead. Compared with my previous plan:

- move Tattenham Corner & Preston from Leatherhead back to Epsom & Ewell;
- move Chipstead et al from Reigate to Leatherhead and Banstead Village from Epsom & Ewell to Leatherhead;
- move Brockham et al ward (east of Dorking) from Dorking & Godalming to Reigate;
- move Mickleham et al ward from Leatherhead to Dorking & Godalming.

I also suggest
- as suggested by islington, swap Effingham and Shalford wards of Guildford between Guildford and Dorking & Godalming;
- as I already suggested, swap Milford and Chiddingfold & Dunsfold wards of Waverley between Dorking & Godalming and SW Surrey.

That gives
Reigate 69,845
Leatherhead 71,906
Dorking & Godalming 71,035
Guildford 71,367
SW Surrey 70,276

[mattb]

Stealing everyone's best thoughts and if you're prepared to accept three seats crossing Southampton boundary then you can get to something that preserves all current seats in something like recognisable form:

[matureleft]

Jan 17, 2021 18:00:45 GMT mattb said:

Here's my offering for Sussex. Not sure sure whether there's anything here that's new.
Brighton and Worthing largely unchanged.

As a Chichester resident (now) I'm a bit uncomfortable with the designs at that end of West Sussex. This one has the eponymous seat with the little city itself tucked in one corner. Yes, all the wards proposed are in Chichester district but those to the far north east are very remote from the urban area and were detached in the last boundary review (although the ward boundaries have been redrawn since), and placed with other similar rural wards in the (amalgam) Arundel and South Downs constituency. This, and other proposals here, plonk them back and remove the much more closely related Chichester district wards to the south-east of the city. As an aside Southbourne ward is effectively part of Emsworth in Hampshire and would have been useful if required in a pairing. Likewise the wards at the north end of the district are pretty closely related to the nearby towns in Hampshire (Petersfield and Liphook) and Surrey (Haslemere).

That said, I admit to not having attempted to master the tools to produce alternative designs! And the pairing suggested of the two Sussexes appears reasonably logical in a regional statistical context. The two counties share the characteristic (generally - Crawley is a big exception) of urban development of varying sizes along the coast and sprawling (and generally very beautiful) rural areas away from there. Really coherent design isn't easy without cross border seats related to more natural communities in neighbouring counties.

[East Anglian Lefty]

The issue is that Bognor and Littlehampton is too large, but if you shed Littlehampton then the only realistic way to fix that is to go into Chichester district. given there's no direct road link between Bognor and Selsey, that means the seat is going to have to extend right up to the edge of Chichester.

EDIT: Or if you really don't want that, the next most plausible option is to put Chichester in with Bognor. But that requires separating Felpham from Bognor, which doesn't look like it'd be desirable in the abstract.

[matureleft]

Jan 20, 2021 11:27:59 GMT East Anglian Lefty said:

The issue is that Bognor and Littlehampton is too large, but if you shed Littlehampton then the only realistic way to fix that is to go into Chichester district. given there's no direct road link between Bognor and Selsey, that means the seat is going to have to extend right up to the edge of Chichester.

EDIT: Or if you really don't want that, the next most plausible option is to put Chichester in with Bognor. But that requires separating Felpham from Bognor, which doesn't look like it'd be desirable in the abstract.

Indeed. Not easy. As I said the geography isn't helpful - the coastal communities aren't neat sizes and assembling the necessary numbers produces sprawl however you do it as you add in very rural, often unrelated spaces. But that has always been so, and these attempts are arguably no worse than past efforts. No, carving out Felpham wouldn't work. And, to be fair, some of the communities south east of Chichester look toward Bognor and its environs. The two communities (Chichester and Bognor) are close together and were in one seat prior to 1974. Uncomfortable, but grudgingly accepting!

[islington]

Here's yet another stab at 18 seats in Hants, with huge thanks in particular to EAL. I've utilized his ingenious version of Basingstoke to absorb more electors in the north of the county and relieve pressure elsewhere. I've also used his version of Southampton, which has far more respect for the city boundary than my previous plan.

North East Hampshire - 75489. A very reasonable seat, apart from the Yateley split.

Basingstoke - 76948. As per EAL. It's ungainly but ingenious and - unlike other versions of this seat - it soaks up plenty of electors.

Alton - 76093. Not the prettiest seat ever created but far from the worst; probably best seen as the successor to E Hants.

North West Hampshire - 74063. I'm happy with this configuation, with Andover nested nicely in the seat.

Winchester - 75363. Compared with the current seat, loses the Alresford area and takes in Stockbridge. This iteration is less attractive than my previous proposal but still perfectly acceptable.

East Hampshire - 75518. Or it could be Petersfield; best seen as the successor to Meon Valley.

Mid Hampshire - 75538. Really 'Eastleigh sans Eastleigh'; I couldn't think what else to call it, and I can never say no to a 'Mid' seat. Possibly 'Bishop's Waltham'?

Romsey and Eastleigh - 76925. I tried to avoid putting these two places in the same seat. It also includes two Southampton wards.

Southampton Test - 72438. As per EAL. Wholly contained within the city.

Southampton Itchen - 76402. Also as per EAL.

All other seats as I had them before.

[Khunanup]

All the 18 seat Hampshires belong on the pitchfork thread (especially due to the carnage they do to Scum & environs).

I maintain that the natural pairing for Hants is Surrey in this review and I hope that's where the BCE end up.

[Pete Whitehead]

Jan 20, 2021 13:49:33 GMT Khunanup said:

All the 18 seat Hampshires belong on the pitchfork thread (especially due to the carnage they do to Scum & environs).

I maintain that the natural pairing for Hants is Surrey in this review and I hope that's where the BCE end up.

At the beginning of the thread you suggested this

Jan 5, 2021 18:46:27 GMT Khunanup said:

Jan 5, 2021 18:18:44 GMT YL said:

The target is 89 seats excluding Wight.

I'd start off trying

Bucks inc. MK (8)
Oxfordshire (7)
Surrey (12)
Kent inc. Medway (18)
Both Sussexes inc. B & H (17)
Portsmouth (2)
Hants CC, Southampton and Berkshire (25)

Berkshire could stand alone but it would be tight, and the pairing makes Hampshire easier as well.

Hmmm, looking at that again I'd be tempted to pair Berks, Surrey & Hants so you maximise your options in terms of sorting out the parts of seats each county is due and you can have the most sensible solutions possible for the tri-county area (so you don't have to have parts of Hants choose between Berks or Surrey where communities cross the county boundaries with abandon).

I have been trying something on these lines because instinctively this sounds right but haven't been able to make it work yet, because the numbers just don't work in the area where this would be the obvious thing to do (Aldershot/Farnham/Camberley/Sandhurst). The trouble is that Berkshire needs to supply the greater part of a quota whereas it only makes sense in this area to nibble off a small part of a quota in Sandhurst (at a push bringing in Crowthorne too) and this causes problems for Bracknell and thence to neighbouring seats. Hampshire/Surrey may work better but again you have the issue that it is Surrey that needs to supply the larger part (so an Aldesrshot link is a bit of a non-starter, especially as that is in quota). So you'd be looking at adding Grayshott/Headley/Liphook to the Farnham area, but you're still left with a problem in Berkshire and would need to add a separate block of Hampshire wards to sort that. It looks like Surrey can manage OK on its own whereas Berkshire and Hampshire are where the real problems are going to lie