On Thursday, if the media is to be believed, there will be a reset in the political landscape in England, Scotland and Wales.
The devolved parliaments in Scotland and Wales have elections and almost everywhere has local elections. I lost interest in devolved parliaments after the Irish parliament was dissolved in 1800 (I won’t get started on the injustice that was ultimately done to Irish Peers as a result, partly because they arrived at the same place as all hereditary peers but unusually for anything Irish were sixty years early.) But I am mildly interested in who runs Hammersmith and Fulham borough council.
In the forty-five years I have been a householder there have been incompetent Conservative and Labour administrations but recently Labour seem to have got the hang of it. Likewise there is now a good Labour MP – I mean a good constituency MP. But you need to know a bit about the borough.
“Covering 6.3 square miles, Hammersmith & Fulham is one of the smallest local authority areas in England. Home to about 188,000 people, it is also one of the most densely populated, despite the growth in absolute numbers slowing. It crams a lot into a small space.
At the borough’s southern end, where it meets the north bank of one of the big curves of the Thames, Fulham provides a classic early case of London gentrification. Tight terraces that had been home to workers in old industries were bought up and done up by the professional classes during the 1980s.
That riverfront end also takes in Parsons Green and the Hurlingham private members club and gives access to Wandsworth via Putney Bridge and Wandsworth Bridge. Fulham Football Club, the Premier League’s quaintest, looks out across the water too, including, every spring, at the Oxford-Cambridge boat race passing by. In this territory, we find surviving Conservative support.
Move north, perhaps up Fulham Palace Road or North End Road, and you’re into the more mixed areas of Barons Court, West Kensington and Hammersmith, all strung along a section of the A4 Great West Road that cuts through the borough on its east-west axis. On the west side, where the river forms another part of the borough border, find the Riverside Studios culture venue adjacent to Hammersmith Bridge. On the east we find Chelsea Football Club and half of the huge Earl’s Court redevelopment scheme, which aims to fill the space left vacant by the demolition of the famous exhibition centre of that name under a previous, failed project (the other half is in Kensington & Chelsea next door).
Keep going, and Shepherd’s Bush offers a century-old street market, a much newer Westfield mall and the borough’s third famous football club, Queens Park Rangers. White City takes its name from the plaster used in the construction of the pavilions of a separate exhibition site in the early 1900s. A White City Stadium built at the same time hosted the 1908 Olympics. It was demolished in the 1980s and, until recently, the BBC filled the space. Eventually, you come to a piece of the A40 and then the open space of Wormwood Scrubs, a name also attached to a local prison.
The borough’s housing is split roughly three ways between social rented, owner occupied and private rented, with the latter on the rise. It is notably expensive. International companies such as Disney and L’Oreal have their UK headquarters in Hammersmith, demonstrating that parts of Hammersmith & Fulham aren’t far from the West End. It is cosmopolitan too, with 46 per cent of its residents born overseas – high even by London standards. To the familiar London mix can be added thousands from Italy, France, Spain and the United States. This is not a Brexit borough.
Although Hammersmith & Fulham has been a mainstay of two-party politics – the last time any other candidates were elected was a couple of Lib Dems in 1994 – it cannot be entirely insulated against the collapse of the Labour-Conservative duopoly. We can expect a bit of splintering and a sharp drop from the 2022 combined vote of 81%; Labour with 54 percent and the Conservatives with 27 percent. But other parties may still struggle to gain seats.”
(Lowick Hedry , OnLondon and Studio Baobab)
So there won’t be much excitement here when the votes are counted unless there is a catastrophically low turnout. While rural areas vote to get potholes filled, we only want our bins emptied.