Post by batman on Jul 16, 2023 10:05:16 GMT
Edited to take into account the 2024 general election result.
CLAPHAM AND BRIXTON HILL
For some years, the present-day London Borough of Lambeth had 4 compact constituencies all to itself. A combination of circumstances, including the increasing willingness of the Boundary Commission to cross borough boundaries, has seen this number gradually dwindle, and since the 2024 general election this has become the sole constituency entirely within the boundaries of that borough. The name Lambeth Central (there was a so-named constituency briefly, from 1974 to 1983) was proposed for revival, but in the end this was altered to Clapham and Brixton Hill. This is a reasonable description of this new constituency, although it is not complete.
Where exactly is Clapham? Some people would think of Clapham Junction station and its surrounding area, which is often called after the station, one of the busiest in the country if not the busiest. However, Clapham Junction was a distinct misnomer when it was named, as it is quite a long way from Clapham town and even not all that close to the edge of Clapham Common. Clapham Junction was until 1964 in the fairly small Borough of Battersea, whereas Clapham itself was in the borough of Wandsworth. Then the creation of the present-day London Boroughs moved the whole of the borough of Battersea, including Clapham Junction, into a heavily redrawn new Borough of Wandsworth, but all but a very small portion (and even that is arguable) of the town and general community of Clapham, which has the SW4 postcode whereas Clapham Junction bears Battersea's SW11 postcode, was moved into a greatly expanded borough of Lambeth alongside Brixton, which has been in the borough of Lambeth since the 19th century. This process led to Clapham Common, a very large and much-visited open space, being split between Wandsworth and Lambeth. Clapham is a distinct town with a busy high street, which has an attractive array of restaurants of many nationalities, a big supermarket and some smaller ones, and several pubs and clubs, though it is not a location to shop for clothes, for example. It is a large enough community to have several wards of at times highly contrasting character, and the variety is to be found within the wards themselves in most cases. The Boundary Commission worked with the pre-2022 wards in making their recommendations; there are now, after the ward boundary changes, essentially 4 wards with Clapham in their names which form a large part of this constituency. These are Clapham East, Clapham Common and Abbeville, Clapham Town and Clapham Park. Two of these, Clapham East and Clapham Park, are major Labour strongholds, and appearances are not deceptive. Clapham Common and Abbeville (it does not actually take in all of Clapham Common, not even that part of it which is within the borough of Lambeth) is very much the opposite; although it does have a significant council estate element in its south-eastern corner, hard by the South Circular Road where Cavendish Road becomes Poynders Road, its great majority is owner-occupied or privately rented. Abbeville Road (other roads in the area are also named after medium-sized Northern French towns, like this one) runs through the ward and has become the centre of a very trendy and upmarket area indeed, with small independent local shops and restaurants, as well as a thriving, upmarket, fairly recently-created pub, the Abbeville. With the proximity of Clapham to the Northern Line, it is not surprising that some of the excellent 19th-century owner-occupied houses are lived in by City and other financial workers, well-to-do lawyers and so on, but while this was indeed the last part of the borough of Lambeth to elect any Conservative councillors, and the ward still has a coherent Tory vote, this does not betoken Conservative dominance for similar reasons seen in many inner London constituencies. Clapham Park is further east from here, and has a strong council estate element. In days gone by there was enough owner-occupied housing (mostly interwar rather than Victorian here) to make the Conservatives competitive in a good year in this area, but those days are about a generation ago now. There is, as with all of the council estates in the borough and many in neighbouring ones, a very large Black population in the council estates, though White British residents are far from absent and there are members of plenty of other ethnic minorities too. The new Clapham East ward, to its north, is in some ways another misnomer, and perhaps might just as easily be called Clapham North-East. Although there is also a Clapham Town ward, and has been for many years, in fact this Clapham East ward includes one side of the High Street. It is distinctly dominated by various smallish council estates of various types and vintages, interspersed with a few privately-built roads, with its larger townhouses almost all split up into flats; one noteworthy exception to this is the beautiful 19th-century terraced mansions of Crescent Grove, immediately off Clapham Common, whose inhabitants tend to be old-school posh and extremely well-off. This street is almost entirely surrounded by much poorer ones, and indeed it backs on to the local food bank. Some of the council-built dwellings have been sold into the private sector, and it is not all that unusual to find upwardly-mobile young professionals (who used to be called Yuppies) in council-built flats, taking advantage of Clapham's attractions nearby. The ward stretches far enough north to take in part of the Stockwell community, the other side of Clapham North underground station. Clapham Town is the most socially polarised of all the Clapham community wards. The ward stretches from the northern side of the High Street, and includes a small portion of Clapham Common itself. Some of the streets closest to the Common are extremely wealthy and resemble many of the best-off areas in the neighbouring borough of Wandsworth, and there are some other very high-quality private dwellings in, especially, the southern half of the ward. But also included are some fair-sized council estates, mostly over a century old, and also a housing co-op based around Cedars Road, in the far west of the ward and borough, which have always given Labour a firm base in the ward. The Tories used to give Labour a real run for its money in this ward, but as with in other upmarket inner London areas their vote has faded rapidly in recent years, although it is still present. Labour has now racked up a goodly majority here, although it is not as safe as many other Lambeth wards for them. The ward even features a left-wing co-operatively owned pub, the Bread and Roses, in a pleasant 19th-century area of mixed housing tenure. As a whole, Clapham is an extremely socially mixed area, but its council estates and less executive housing generally outnumber the wealthier parts around Clapham Common, north and south, including Abbeville. These new arrangements do unite the Clapham community, which up to now has been split between the Vauxhall and Streatham constituencies. To make it clear, I do not count Clapham Junction, which is really in Battersea, as part of the Clapham community, and previously when Clapham had an eponymous constituency it was not included, just as it is not now.
Brixton is at least equally well-known to non-Londoners as Clapham is. Most would inevitably associate Brixton with the locally long-established British Caribbean community, and this remains an extremely important element of Brixton, although joined nowadays by a very large African community, which is fairly close to parity with the Caribbean community now. Brixton gave its name to a constituency until 1974, and was almost completely united within the successor Lambeth Central seat, but since 1983 the town's wards have been split between constituencies. The boundary between Clapham and Brixton lies along the B221, King's Avenue in its southern stretch, and Bedford Road in its northern one. The boundary is a pretty smooth one and the scenery by no means changes immediately when one crosses it. The proposed new boundary arrangement will continue to split Brixton's community between constituencies, hence the specific Brixton Hill rather than just the more generic Brixton in the constituency name. Brixton has some very well-known local landmarks, such as the Ritzy Cinema, the Academy which is a popular gig venue, and its markets both open and closed, not to mention Lambeth's Town Hall which stands proud close to the town centre, and its famous prison. Its varied demographic make-up is reflected in the variety of restaurants and stalls one can find in its town centre, which has even included a Colombian restaurant in its covered market under the railway by Brixton station. Although Brixton has for decades been well-known for its Black communities, there is certainly a large White prosperous middle-class population in its 19th-century privately-built streets, and in fact of the outgoing parliamentary constituencies none of the seats which includes any part of Brixton had the largest UK-wide Black population; that distinction now belongs to nearby Peckham, previously to Camberwell & Peckham, neither of which includes or included any of the Brixton community. Whereas in the 1980s Yuppies were said to call Clapham "Claam" (in fact, you never hear anybody seriously calling it that), it is said, possibly but not definitely apocryphally, that hardline Yuppies who found themselves living in SW2 were sometimes known to call Brixton "Brighton". Amongst the lower-rent private flats and the council estates, Brixton does have some very elegant streets here and there, including Trinity Gardens very close to the town centre (though even Trinity Gardens also includes some council flats). Politically Brixton's wards all vote Labour, all by wide margins although it is the east of the Brixton community, which is not to be included in this new seat, where Labour has often been furthest ahead.
Most though not all of the Stockwell community completes the constituency. Stockwell has its own SW9 postcode, but the postcodes are drawn somewhat oddly in this part of London, and quite a large chunk of SW9 is, pretty clearly, really Brixton rather than Stockwell; indeed, Brixton town centre is in SW9. The SW2 postcode, which is supposed to belong to Brixton, does take in the southern half of Brixton's community, but actually stretches quite a long way south from Brixton to take in areas which are, in turn, unequivocally really in Streatham rather than Brixton. Stockwell, like Brixton, has an underground station, which is a major Tube interchange between the Northern and Victoria lines (the latter of which terminates at Brixton). The same people who allegedly called Clapham Claam and Brixton Brighton were also far from unknown in Stockwell, and allegedly called it St Ockwell (and Streatham, allegedly, St Reatham's), though again I stress that you will be extremely hard put to find anyone unfacetiously calling Stockwell by that nomenclature. It is quite hard to say for sure where Stockwell ends and Brixton begins, and the area sometimes known as Angell Town can reasonably claim to be in both. Stockwell, with its proximity to Brixton, has a fairly similar social and ethnic composition to it, although it is less well-known as a centre of Black population. It too has its council estates but also its upwardly mobile privately-built streets. Stockwell also tends to share Brixton's electoral preferences, being a generally secure area for Labour.
This is a constituency of social contrasts, with some very poor and some very wealthy areas. However, the sort of voters who now form the greater part of the Conservative vote no longer live in these parts in profusion, and it is harder to imagine a prominent Conservative politician emerging from here as the 1990s Conservative Prime Minister John Major did than it was in his time. Major won the old Ferndale ward, basically north-west Brixton, in 1968, which was surprising enough at the time but would be completely absurd today. Even if Clapham and Brixton Hill's wealthier voters were completely united in their preferences for the Conservatives as they once would have been much likelier to be, they would still almost always be outvoted by the less moneyed voters in the constituency. This is yet another safe Labour seat in inner London and one where the opposition to Labour is likely to continue to struggle to rival the prevailing party. The result here in 2024 was not quite the same as seen in some neighbouring seats, although the easy win for Labour's Bell(avia) Ribeiro-Addy was typical enough. The Greens managed, as with almost all of inner south London, a sharp increase in their share of the vote, but unlike in a number of inner-city seats nearby it was the Liberal Democrats who, despite a noticeable drop in their share of the vote, at least managed to maintain a distant second place. The Conservative share in fourth place almost halved, reflecting their travails in constituencies such as these. Not entirely typically for inner south London, the share of the vote for Ribeiro-Addy actually increased more or less in line with the national average, and her positioning very much on the Left of the Labour Party perhaps reduced the propensity of more radical voters to desert Labour in favour of other parties, though the failure of the Workers' Party of Britain to field a candidate may have helped her too. This vote share increase took place despite a very skeletal campaign by Labour locally, as the CLP members were urged to travel, if they could, all the way to Worthing West in order to help gain that on-paper distant target from the Tories, which indeed Labour did; this writer observed quite a number of Clapham & Brixton CLP members heed this request, and Ribeiro-Addy herself, quite a Labour Party loyalist in many ways, campaigned in Worthing West as well as in her own constituency. This seat will be safe for Labour for a lot longer to come one suspects, and no doubt local CLP members will be urged to campaign in more marginal seats again come the next general election.
CLAPHAM AND BRIXTON HILL
For some years, the present-day London Borough of Lambeth had 4 compact constituencies all to itself. A combination of circumstances, including the increasing willingness of the Boundary Commission to cross borough boundaries, has seen this number gradually dwindle, and since the 2024 general election this has become the sole constituency entirely within the boundaries of that borough. The name Lambeth Central (there was a so-named constituency briefly, from 1974 to 1983) was proposed for revival, but in the end this was altered to Clapham and Brixton Hill. This is a reasonable description of this new constituency, although it is not complete.
Where exactly is Clapham? Some people would think of Clapham Junction station and its surrounding area, which is often called after the station, one of the busiest in the country if not the busiest. However, Clapham Junction was a distinct misnomer when it was named, as it is quite a long way from Clapham town and even not all that close to the edge of Clapham Common. Clapham Junction was until 1964 in the fairly small Borough of Battersea, whereas Clapham itself was in the borough of Wandsworth. Then the creation of the present-day London Boroughs moved the whole of the borough of Battersea, including Clapham Junction, into a heavily redrawn new Borough of Wandsworth, but all but a very small portion (and even that is arguable) of the town and general community of Clapham, which has the SW4 postcode whereas Clapham Junction bears Battersea's SW11 postcode, was moved into a greatly expanded borough of Lambeth alongside Brixton, which has been in the borough of Lambeth since the 19th century. This process led to Clapham Common, a very large and much-visited open space, being split between Wandsworth and Lambeth. Clapham is a distinct town with a busy high street, which has an attractive array of restaurants of many nationalities, a big supermarket and some smaller ones, and several pubs and clubs, though it is not a location to shop for clothes, for example. It is a large enough community to have several wards of at times highly contrasting character, and the variety is to be found within the wards themselves in most cases. The Boundary Commission worked with the pre-2022 wards in making their recommendations; there are now, after the ward boundary changes, essentially 4 wards with Clapham in their names which form a large part of this constituency. These are Clapham East, Clapham Common and Abbeville, Clapham Town and Clapham Park. Two of these, Clapham East and Clapham Park, are major Labour strongholds, and appearances are not deceptive. Clapham Common and Abbeville (it does not actually take in all of Clapham Common, not even that part of it which is within the borough of Lambeth) is very much the opposite; although it does have a significant council estate element in its south-eastern corner, hard by the South Circular Road where Cavendish Road becomes Poynders Road, its great majority is owner-occupied or privately rented. Abbeville Road (other roads in the area are also named after medium-sized Northern French towns, like this one) runs through the ward and has become the centre of a very trendy and upmarket area indeed, with small independent local shops and restaurants, as well as a thriving, upmarket, fairly recently-created pub, the Abbeville. With the proximity of Clapham to the Northern Line, it is not surprising that some of the excellent 19th-century owner-occupied houses are lived in by City and other financial workers, well-to-do lawyers and so on, but while this was indeed the last part of the borough of Lambeth to elect any Conservative councillors, and the ward still has a coherent Tory vote, this does not betoken Conservative dominance for similar reasons seen in many inner London constituencies. Clapham Park is further east from here, and has a strong council estate element. In days gone by there was enough owner-occupied housing (mostly interwar rather than Victorian here) to make the Conservatives competitive in a good year in this area, but those days are about a generation ago now. There is, as with all of the council estates in the borough and many in neighbouring ones, a very large Black population in the council estates, though White British residents are far from absent and there are members of plenty of other ethnic minorities too. The new Clapham East ward, to its north, is in some ways another misnomer, and perhaps might just as easily be called Clapham North-East. Although there is also a Clapham Town ward, and has been for many years, in fact this Clapham East ward includes one side of the High Street. It is distinctly dominated by various smallish council estates of various types and vintages, interspersed with a few privately-built roads, with its larger townhouses almost all split up into flats; one noteworthy exception to this is the beautiful 19th-century terraced mansions of Crescent Grove, immediately off Clapham Common, whose inhabitants tend to be old-school posh and extremely well-off. This street is almost entirely surrounded by much poorer ones, and indeed it backs on to the local food bank. Some of the council-built dwellings have been sold into the private sector, and it is not all that unusual to find upwardly-mobile young professionals (who used to be called Yuppies) in council-built flats, taking advantage of Clapham's attractions nearby. The ward stretches far enough north to take in part of the Stockwell community, the other side of Clapham North underground station. Clapham Town is the most socially polarised of all the Clapham community wards. The ward stretches from the northern side of the High Street, and includes a small portion of Clapham Common itself. Some of the streets closest to the Common are extremely wealthy and resemble many of the best-off areas in the neighbouring borough of Wandsworth, and there are some other very high-quality private dwellings in, especially, the southern half of the ward. But also included are some fair-sized council estates, mostly over a century old, and also a housing co-op based around Cedars Road, in the far west of the ward and borough, which have always given Labour a firm base in the ward. The Tories used to give Labour a real run for its money in this ward, but as with in other upmarket inner London areas their vote has faded rapidly in recent years, although it is still present. Labour has now racked up a goodly majority here, although it is not as safe as many other Lambeth wards for them. The ward even features a left-wing co-operatively owned pub, the Bread and Roses, in a pleasant 19th-century area of mixed housing tenure. As a whole, Clapham is an extremely socially mixed area, but its council estates and less executive housing generally outnumber the wealthier parts around Clapham Common, north and south, including Abbeville. These new arrangements do unite the Clapham community, which up to now has been split between the Vauxhall and Streatham constituencies. To make it clear, I do not count Clapham Junction, which is really in Battersea, as part of the Clapham community, and previously when Clapham had an eponymous constituency it was not included, just as it is not now.
Brixton is at least equally well-known to non-Londoners as Clapham is. Most would inevitably associate Brixton with the locally long-established British Caribbean community, and this remains an extremely important element of Brixton, although joined nowadays by a very large African community, which is fairly close to parity with the Caribbean community now. Brixton gave its name to a constituency until 1974, and was almost completely united within the successor Lambeth Central seat, but since 1983 the town's wards have been split between constituencies. The boundary between Clapham and Brixton lies along the B221, King's Avenue in its southern stretch, and Bedford Road in its northern one. The boundary is a pretty smooth one and the scenery by no means changes immediately when one crosses it. The proposed new boundary arrangement will continue to split Brixton's community between constituencies, hence the specific Brixton Hill rather than just the more generic Brixton in the constituency name. Brixton has some very well-known local landmarks, such as the Ritzy Cinema, the Academy which is a popular gig venue, and its markets both open and closed, not to mention Lambeth's Town Hall which stands proud close to the town centre, and its famous prison. Its varied demographic make-up is reflected in the variety of restaurants and stalls one can find in its town centre, which has even included a Colombian restaurant in its covered market under the railway by Brixton station. Although Brixton has for decades been well-known for its Black communities, there is certainly a large White prosperous middle-class population in its 19th-century privately-built streets, and in fact of the outgoing parliamentary constituencies none of the seats which includes any part of Brixton had the largest UK-wide Black population; that distinction now belongs to nearby Peckham, previously to Camberwell & Peckham, neither of which includes or included any of the Brixton community. Whereas in the 1980s Yuppies were said to call Clapham "Claam" (in fact, you never hear anybody seriously calling it that), it is said, possibly but not definitely apocryphally, that hardline Yuppies who found themselves living in SW2 were sometimes known to call Brixton "Brighton". Amongst the lower-rent private flats and the council estates, Brixton does have some very elegant streets here and there, including Trinity Gardens very close to the town centre (though even Trinity Gardens also includes some council flats). Politically Brixton's wards all vote Labour, all by wide margins although it is the east of the Brixton community, which is not to be included in this new seat, where Labour has often been furthest ahead.
Most though not all of the Stockwell community completes the constituency. Stockwell has its own SW9 postcode, but the postcodes are drawn somewhat oddly in this part of London, and quite a large chunk of SW9 is, pretty clearly, really Brixton rather than Stockwell; indeed, Brixton town centre is in SW9. The SW2 postcode, which is supposed to belong to Brixton, does take in the southern half of Brixton's community, but actually stretches quite a long way south from Brixton to take in areas which are, in turn, unequivocally really in Streatham rather than Brixton. Stockwell, like Brixton, has an underground station, which is a major Tube interchange between the Northern and Victoria lines (the latter of which terminates at Brixton). The same people who allegedly called Clapham Claam and Brixton Brighton were also far from unknown in Stockwell, and allegedly called it St Ockwell (and Streatham, allegedly, St Reatham's), though again I stress that you will be extremely hard put to find anyone unfacetiously calling Stockwell by that nomenclature. It is quite hard to say for sure where Stockwell ends and Brixton begins, and the area sometimes known as Angell Town can reasonably claim to be in both. Stockwell, with its proximity to Brixton, has a fairly similar social and ethnic composition to it, although it is less well-known as a centre of Black population. It too has its council estates but also its upwardly mobile privately-built streets. Stockwell also tends to share Brixton's electoral preferences, being a generally secure area for Labour.
This is a constituency of social contrasts, with some very poor and some very wealthy areas. However, the sort of voters who now form the greater part of the Conservative vote no longer live in these parts in profusion, and it is harder to imagine a prominent Conservative politician emerging from here as the 1990s Conservative Prime Minister John Major did than it was in his time. Major won the old Ferndale ward, basically north-west Brixton, in 1968, which was surprising enough at the time but would be completely absurd today. Even if Clapham and Brixton Hill's wealthier voters were completely united in their preferences for the Conservatives as they once would have been much likelier to be, they would still almost always be outvoted by the less moneyed voters in the constituency. This is yet another safe Labour seat in inner London and one where the opposition to Labour is likely to continue to struggle to rival the prevailing party. The result here in 2024 was not quite the same as seen in some neighbouring seats, although the easy win for Labour's Bell(avia) Ribeiro-Addy was typical enough. The Greens managed, as with almost all of inner south London, a sharp increase in their share of the vote, but unlike in a number of inner-city seats nearby it was the Liberal Democrats who, despite a noticeable drop in their share of the vote, at least managed to maintain a distant second place. The Conservative share in fourth place almost halved, reflecting their travails in constituencies such as these. Not entirely typically for inner south London, the share of the vote for Ribeiro-Addy actually increased more or less in line with the national average, and her positioning very much on the Left of the Labour Party perhaps reduced the propensity of more radical voters to desert Labour in favour of other parties, though the failure of the Workers' Party of Britain to field a candidate may have helped her too. This vote share increase took place despite a very skeletal campaign by Labour locally, as the CLP members were urged to travel, if they could, all the way to Worthing West in order to help gain that on-paper distant target from the Tories, which indeed Labour did; this writer observed quite a number of Clapham & Brixton CLP members heed this request, and Ribeiro-Addy herself, quite a Labour Party loyalist in many ways, campaigned in Worthing West as well as in her own constituency. This seat will be safe for Labour for a lot longer to come one suspects, and no doubt local CLP members will be urged to campaign in more marginal seats again come the next general election.
