Post by Pete Whitehead on Dec 9, 2023 23:41:42 GMT
The constituency boundaries in this part of London have undergone major changes at each of the last five (completed) boundary reviews, including the latest and often these have had dramatic partisan effects. More than almost anywhere else in England this area provides a stark example of wealth and poverty living side by side.
It may hardly be obvious from the name, but this is essentially the successor to the Westminster North seat. Before 1974 the former London boroughs of Paddington and St Marylebone (which were absorbed into the enlarged Westminster in 1964) contained three constituencies – safe Labour Paddington North and safe Conservative Paddington South and St Marylebone. In 1974 the two Paddington seats were merged creating a unified Paddington seat which was won narrowly by Labour in February of that year, in a contest between two sitting MPs (Nick Scott of Paddington South, who later reappeared as MP for Chelsea, and Arthur Latham of Paddington North). In 1979 Paddington was gained extremely narrowly by John Wheeler for the Conservatives (Arthur Latham also enjoyed a political life after losing Paddington, as a long-time leader of the Labour group on Havering council).
Ahead of the 1983 election there was another major boundary change as most of Paddington (less only the Hyde Park ward) was merged with the Northern half of the abolished St Marylebone seat to form a new Westminster North. Hyde Park was a strongly Conservative ward and the parts of St Marylebone added included the one strongly Labour ward of Church Street as well as the very affluent St Johns Wood area and Westminster North was a marginal throughout its first lifetime, although owing to the favourable regional and national picture, John Wheeler won with increased majorities in each of the three elections.
Then ahead of the 1997 election the boundary commission again drastically redrew and renamed the seat. Two former Paddington wards were lost from the south of the seat - Bayswater and Lancaster Gate. This area was on balance fairly strongly Conservative, but the real problem for them came with the addition of five safe Labour wards from North Kensington. This was more than enough to wipe out the still modest Conservative lead and in the circumstances of the Blair elections, Regents Park & Kensington North (as the seat was now called) was very safe for Labour, returning former Westminster councillor Karen Buck.
In 2010, just as the pendulum was swinging back to the Conservatives nationally, the boundary commission more or less restored the status quo ante, reviving Westminster North on very similar boundaries to those that existed between 1983 and 1997 and giving the Conservatives genuine hopes of their own revival. Perhaps partly owing to a poor candidate choice but also to the underwhelming performance of David Cameron’s Conservatives in that election, these hopes were dashed as Karen Buck held on with a lead of around 2,000 which was maintained in 2015. In 2017, in common with most of London there was a huge swing to Labour, taking the majority up to five figures and this lead was also more or less sustained in 2019. Westminster North now looked like a safe Labour seat, despite the presence of areas of considerable local Conservative strength.
The effect of the latest boundary change is to remove most of those areas and complete the transformation from a marginal to an ultra-safe Labour seat.
The initial proposals of the boundary commission were a shambles in this area and would have effectively abolished this seat, with the larger part joining with a number of Camden wards to form a ‘Camden Town & St John’s Wood’ constituency – an unwieldy name for an incoherent seat. The revised proposals were a large improvement and these (though not the name – it was originally to be called Queen’s Park & Little Venice) were retained in the final review.
The boundary changes are major, removing four of the nine current Westminster wards and replacing them with three wards from Brent.
Bayswater and Lancaster Gate are again removed (this time to Kensington) – although these areas have shifted to Labour, with that party gaining the Lancaster Gate ward for the first time ever in 2022, this area is still on balance more favourable to the Conservative than that which remains. The other area removed is the one remaining Conservative stronghold in Westminster North – essentially the community of St John’s Wood, the wards of Abbey Road and Regent’s Park. The names of these wards alone are redolent of London tourist attractions and this area includes, inter alia, the Lords Cricket ground, the London Zoo and the Madame Tussauds waxworks museum. Even in their disastrous local elections in 2022, when Labour took control of Westminster city council for the first time, the Conservatives retained these wards comfortably. These two wards are to be added to the Cities of London & Westminster seat where they will be a useful addition for the Conservatives as they hope to hold that seat, while they must have lost any hope by now in Westminster North.
The one remaining part of the old St Marylebone borough here is now the anomalous Church Street ward – a highly deprived area centred on Lisson Grove which is dominated by council estates and has the largest Arab population of any ward in the country* (perhaps contrary to popular belief, most Arabs resident in London are not wealthy sheiks living in Mayfair and Park Lane but much poorer residents of council estates such as here and other parts of this constituency). Notwithstanding a freak Conservative by-election victory in 2008 (which was influenced by ‘communal’ politics), Church Street is an ultra-safe Labour ward.
Most of the ex-Paddington wards are similar, but not all. Facing Church Street ward across the Edgware Road is Little Venice. This is now the only ward with Conservative councillors as they did well to top the poll here and retain two of three seats in 2022 as historically safer wards fell to Labour. There are some very wealthy areas with Georgian terraces and mansion blocks around Warwick Avenue for example as well as council tower blocks close to the Edgware Road, typifying the social bifurcation of this area. Maida Vale to the North bears some similarity, with a mixture of wealthy enclaves and council estates but here the latter are more dominant, and Labour already held the ward before 2022 and won by two to one in that year.
In the remaining Westminster wards the ratio was more like five to one. These three wards – Queens Park, Harrow Road and Westbourne are almost entirely deprived, very ethnically diverse, with large Black populations and with a very high level of social housing (over 50% in Queens Park and in Westbourne as it also is in Church Street – these three wards are in the top 20 in London on this metric and in the top 50 in England & Wales). These have always been ultra safe Labour wards, along with Church Street being the only Labour holdouts when the Conservatives had massive majorities on Westminster council in the 90s and 00s. One can get a flavour of the area driving along the Westway on the southern edge of this seat where large housing schemes such as the Brunel estate in Westbourne ward are prominent on both sides of the road.
Clearly, shorn of St Johns Wood and Lancaster Gate, the rump of the old Westminster North is rendered ultra-safe for Labour and the additions from Brent reinforce this.
Two of these come from Hampstead & Kilburn and were previously in Brent East. Kilburn itself has a reputation as a centre of London’s Irish community but this is slightly outdated, and other ethnic minorities are much more numerous now. The Kilburn ward takes in the West side of Kilburn High road on the A5 – as tatty as it has ever been, some would describe it as ‘vibrant’. Inland of here is a mix of housing with council estates interspersing Edwardian terraced housing, some of it gentrified. South of the railway, around Carlton Vale the ward includes the horrific South Kilburn estates – heavily Black and gang-ridden, amongst the worst estates in Brent, though in the process of being redeveloped.
Kilburn is and has always been a very safe Labour ward.
Queens Park ward is somewhat different. This now the whitest and one of the most upmarket wards in Brent as there are fashionable Edwardian villas around Queens Park itself – home to celebrities such as Daniel Craig. The west of the ward around Kensal Rise is distinctly more grotty and in any case this ward is not much less Labour (certainly not much more Tory) than Kilburn as the wealthier residents are of the type who lean left. This was a good area for the Lib Dems, even before the Brent East by-election, but they have fallen away now and it was the Green party who were a distant second to Labour here as they were in the other Brent wards.
The final ward here is a bit of a geographical (but not demographic) outlier. Harlesden & Kensal Green contains the centre of Harlesden around the clock tower and much Victorian terraced housing. Like Kilburn, Harlesden was once an area of heavy Irish immigration but in recent decades has been known as a centre of London’s Afro-Caribbean community. Actually, the Black percentage is not as high in this ward as in the other Harlesden area wards like Roundwood and Stonebridge, but the cultural influence is pervasive. Like most of this seat, Harlesden & Kensal Green is a deprived ward with high crime rates and another ultra-safe Labour ward. Harlesden is a long way out from the core of the seat but is well connected by the Harrow Road which runs through the centre of Harlesden, through five other wards in this seat (including the one so named) all the way to the Edgware Road.
Harrow Road may tie the constituency together, but Queen’s Park is a unifying name, there being wards so named in both the Westminster and Brent sections of the seat. Queens Park itself is more or less in the geographical centre of the seat and gives its name to a well-known football team (albeit which now plays outside the constituency) and therefore has wider name recognition beyond its own area. It seemed superfluous to add a suffix to the name and the indecision of the boundary commission on what that should be shows that no other name offered an obvious choice. But Queen’s Park & Maida Vale is what we have, at least until the next review no doubt changes the boundaries and name all over again.
*I need to check this but am pretty sure this is the case
It may hardly be obvious from the name, but this is essentially the successor to the Westminster North seat. Before 1974 the former London boroughs of Paddington and St Marylebone (which were absorbed into the enlarged Westminster in 1964) contained three constituencies – safe Labour Paddington North and safe Conservative Paddington South and St Marylebone. In 1974 the two Paddington seats were merged creating a unified Paddington seat which was won narrowly by Labour in February of that year, in a contest between two sitting MPs (Nick Scott of Paddington South, who later reappeared as MP for Chelsea, and Arthur Latham of Paddington North). In 1979 Paddington was gained extremely narrowly by John Wheeler for the Conservatives (Arthur Latham also enjoyed a political life after losing Paddington, as a long-time leader of the Labour group on Havering council).
Ahead of the 1983 election there was another major boundary change as most of Paddington (less only the Hyde Park ward) was merged with the Northern half of the abolished St Marylebone seat to form a new Westminster North. Hyde Park was a strongly Conservative ward and the parts of St Marylebone added included the one strongly Labour ward of Church Street as well as the very affluent St Johns Wood area and Westminster North was a marginal throughout its first lifetime, although owing to the favourable regional and national picture, John Wheeler won with increased majorities in each of the three elections.
Then ahead of the 1997 election the boundary commission again drastically redrew and renamed the seat. Two former Paddington wards were lost from the south of the seat - Bayswater and Lancaster Gate. This area was on balance fairly strongly Conservative, but the real problem for them came with the addition of five safe Labour wards from North Kensington. This was more than enough to wipe out the still modest Conservative lead and in the circumstances of the Blair elections, Regents Park & Kensington North (as the seat was now called) was very safe for Labour, returning former Westminster councillor Karen Buck.
In 2010, just as the pendulum was swinging back to the Conservatives nationally, the boundary commission more or less restored the status quo ante, reviving Westminster North on very similar boundaries to those that existed between 1983 and 1997 and giving the Conservatives genuine hopes of their own revival. Perhaps partly owing to a poor candidate choice but also to the underwhelming performance of David Cameron’s Conservatives in that election, these hopes were dashed as Karen Buck held on with a lead of around 2,000 which was maintained in 2015. In 2017, in common with most of London there was a huge swing to Labour, taking the majority up to five figures and this lead was also more or less sustained in 2019. Westminster North now looked like a safe Labour seat, despite the presence of areas of considerable local Conservative strength.
The effect of the latest boundary change is to remove most of those areas and complete the transformation from a marginal to an ultra-safe Labour seat.
The initial proposals of the boundary commission were a shambles in this area and would have effectively abolished this seat, with the larger part joining with a number of Camden wards to form a ‘Camden Town & St John’s Wood’ constituency – an unwieldy name for an incoherent seat. The revised proposals were a large improvement and these (though not the name – it was originally to be called Queen’s Park & Little Venice) were retained in the final review.
The boundary changes are major, removing four of the nine current Westminster wards and replacing them with three wards from Brent.
Bayswater and Lancaster Gate are again removed (this time to Kensington) – although these areas have shifted to Labour, with that party gaining the Lancaster Gate ward for the first time ever in 2022, this area is still on balance more favourable to the Conservative than that which remains. The other area removed is the one remaining Conservative stronghold in Westminster North – essentially the community of St John’s Wood, the wards of Abbey Road and Regent’s Park. The names of these wards alone are redolent of London tourist attractions and this area includes, inter alia, the Lords Cricket ground, the London Zoo and the Madame Tussauds waxworks museum. Even in their disastrous local elections in 2022, when Labour took control of Westminster city council for the first time, the Conservatives retained these wards comfortably. These two wards are to be added to the Cities of London & Westminster seat where they will be a useful addition for the Conservatives as they hope to hold that seat, while they must have lost any hope by now in Westminster North.
The one remaining part of the old St Marylebone borough here is now the anomalous Church Street ward – a highly deprived area centred on Lisson Grove which is dominated by council estates and has the largest Arab population of any ward in the country* (perhaps contrary to popular belief, most Arabs resident in London are not wealthy sheiks living in Mayfair and Park Lane but much poorer residents of council estates such as here and other parts of this constituency). Notwithstanding a freak Conservative by-election victory in 2008 (which was influenced by ‘communal’ politics), Church Street is an ultra-safe Labour ward.
Most of the ex-Paddington wards are similar, but not all. Facing Church Street ward across the Edgware Road is Little Venice. This is now the only ward with Conservative councillors as they did well to top the poll here and retain two of three seats in 2022 as historically safer wards fell to Labour. There are some very wealthy areas with Georgian terraces and mansion blocks around Warwick Avenue for example as well as council tower blocks close to the Edgware Road, typifying the social bifurcation of this area. Maida Vale to the North bears some similarity, with a mixture of wealthy enclaves and council estates but here the latter are more dominant, and Labour already held the ward before 2022 and won by two to one in that year.
In the remaining Westminster wards the ratio was more like five to one. These three wards – Queens Park, Harrow Road and Westbourne are almost entirely deprived, very ethnically diverse, with large Black populations and with a very high level of social housing (over 50% in Queens Park and in Westbourne as it also is in Church Street – these three wards are in the top 20 in London on this metric and in the top 50 in England & Wales). These have always been ultra safe Labour wards, along with Church Street being the only Labour holdouts when the Conservatives had massive majorities on Westminster council in the 90s and 00s. One can get a flavour of the area driving along the Westway on the southern edge of this seat where large housing schemes such as the Brunel estate in Westbourne ward are prominent on both sides of the road.
Clearly, shorn of St Johns Wood and Lancaster Gate, the rump of the old Westminster North is rendered ultra-safe for Labour and the additions from Brent reinforce this.
Two of these come from Hampstead & Kilburn and were previously in Brent East. Kilburn itself has a reputation as a centre of London’s Irish community but this is slightly outdated, and other ethnic minorities are much more numerous now. The Kilburn ward takes in the West side of Kilburn High road on the A5 – as tatty as it has ever been, some would describe it as ‘vibrant’. Inland of here is a mix of housing with council estates interspersing Edwardian terraced housing, some of it gentrified. South of the railway, around Carlton Vale the ward includes the horrific South Kilburn estates – heavily Black and gang-ridden, amongst the worst estates in Brent, though in the process of being redeveloped.
Kilburn is and has always been a very safe Labour ward.
Queens Park ward is somewhat different. This now the whitest and one of the most upmarket wards in Brent as there are fashionable Edwardian villas around Queens Park itself – home to celebrities such as Daniel Craig. The west of the ward around Kensal Rise is distinctly more grotty and in any case this ward is not much less Labour (certainly not much more Tory) than Kilburn as the wealthier residents are of the type who lean left. This was a good area for the Lib Dems, even before the Brent East by-election, but they have fallen away now and it was the Green party who were a distant second to Labour here as they were in the other Brent wards.
The final ward here is a bit of a geographical (but not demographic) outlier. Harlesden & Kensal Green contains the centre of Harlesden around the clock tower and much Victorian terraced housing. Like Kilburn, Harlesden was once an area of heavy Irish immigration but in recent decades has been known as a centre of London’s Afro-Caribbean community. Actually, the Black percentage is not as high in this ward as in the other Harlesden area wards like Roundwood and Stonebridge, but the cultural influence is pervasive. Like most of this seat, Harlesden & Kensal Green is a deprived ward with high crime rates and another ultra-safe Labour ward. Harlesden is a long way out from the core of the seat but is well connected by the Harrow Road which runs through the centre of Harlesden, through five other wards in this seat (including the one so named) all the way to the Edgware Road.
Harrow Road may tie the constituency together, but Queen’s Park is a unifying name, there being wards so named in both the Westminster and Brent sections of the seat. Queens Park itself is more or less in the geographical centre of the seat and gives its name to a well-known football team (albeit which now plays outside the constituency) and therefore has wider name recognition beyond its own area. It seemed superfluous to add a suffix to the name and the indecision of the boundary commission on what that should be shows that no other name offered an obvious choice. But Queen’s Park & Maida Vale is what we have, at least until the next review no doubt changes the boundaries and name all over again.
*I need to check this but am pretty sure this is the case
