One door closes, another opens. Last Thursday, 18 June, the final piece of business of the 2026 borough elections was concluded with the postponed election in Hillingdon West, while in the Lewisham ward of Crofton Park there was the very first by-election of the 2026-30 term of office.
The Crofton Park contest arose because one of the winning candidates on 7 May, the Green Party’s Liam Shrivastava, had also been elected as the executive mayor of Lewisham on the same day. The mayoral election votes were counted first and the result meant Shrivastava was unable to take up an ordinary seat on the council as well.
There are a few by-elections pending because of parties’ (OK, the Green Party’s) incompetence in running candidates who were ineligible. Crofton Park was not one of them and neither is the by-election to be held later this week (25 June) in Dalston where a vacancy has been created by the new Green Mayor of Hackney, Zoë Garbett, being in the same position as Shrivastava.
It is perfectly reasonable for a leading figure in a local party to run for Mayor and seek election as a ward councillor at the same time. It means that, should the candidate’s mayoral bid fail, he or she, who is likely to be an effective local politician, might still help form the council’s opposition group.
This is a good thing for democratic scrutiny, even if it also means that if a candidate wins both the mayoral and their ward seat, they have to resign from the latter, resulting in a by-election that costs the the council money and creates inconvenience for local electors.
Crofton Park is a residential area to the south west of central Lewisham, between Brockley and Catford. It is served by Crofton Park and Honor Oak Park stations, the latter on the Overground’s Windrush line. The name of Crofton Park first appeared in 1881 and the area was previously regarded as being the south side of Brockley, hence the number of roads and local features that bear Brockley’s name.
The development of what is now Crofton Park started in the late 19th Century and continued into the interwar period on a site previously occupied by Brockley Hall, which was demolished in 1931, and towards Honor Oak Park. Most of the housing is terraced. Interwar suburbia starts just to the south. A stretch of the congested South Circular Road marks the ward boundary.
Crofton Park is one of the more settled middle-class wards of Lewisham, which is reflected in its electoral history. It has the highest proportion of mortgage-holding households (38 per cent) and the lowest proportion of social tenants (16 per cent) in Lewisham, and a typically high (58 per cent) proportion of graduates for an inner residential area. Crofton Park had the highest proportion of any Lewisham ward of people who identified as White British in the 2021 Census (49 per cent) and, unusually, that proportion had risen by a couple of percent since 2011 – often a sign of gentrification.
A long time ago “respectable” suburban wards like this used to be capable of voting Conservative, although the last time Crofton Park did so was in 1982. Social change and the changing social bases of the parties made it first a safe Labour seat and then more recently a Labour-Green battleground. It was the Lewisham Greens’ third-best ward in 2006 (25 per cent) and second best in 2022 (33 per cent).
The cluster of wards that includes Crofton Park and the area to its north (Brockley, Ladywell, Telegraph Hill) has long been one of the Greens’ best areas in London. In the context of the 2026 borough elections as a whole, it was no surprise that the party swept all of them. On the 2026 results, Crofton Park was the second-safest Green ward (after Ladywell). It was more of a shock that the Greens did so well in Deptford and Sydenham, which helped power Shrivastava to his mayoral election win.
However, in the by-election, the Greens had an unexpectedly bumpy ride. The first few weeks of their control of Lewisham have been marred by a row over a campaign pledge to cut the mayoral allowance by 20 per cent. It instead increased to £93,795 a year, a rise of 5.4 per cent since the previous mayoral term.
The Greens point out that it is offset by a 20 per cent deduction that will go to local food justice charities, but it is a bad look for an insurgent party to suddenly start arguing about definitions and defending the work of the independent panel that set the allowances. Having made a big issue of this ultimately minor issue before the election, the Lewisham Greens can hardly complain if their local political rivals do not help them put the best construction on the matter.
The Green candidate defending Crofton Park was Esther Lie (pictured) who works for King’s College London on volunteer engagement. She was criticised during the campaign for inappropriate but long-ago (2013) social media posts, for which she made a clear apology. Her Labour opponent was Alex Brooks, vice chair of a local housing charity and former president of the student body of Greenwich University.
Brooks, in the unfamiliar position for a Lewisham Labour candidate of being the challenger, was one of the party’s trio of defeated Crofton Park candidates in May. The local organiser took the opportunity of urging activists to come and support “AB” for the by-election. Candidates stood from the other three of the “big five” parties: Paul Newman for Reform, Richard Elliott for the Liberal Democrats and Caitlin Pugh for the Conservatives. An Independent, Roger Mighton, joined them on the ballot.
The result was a nail-biter, declared only after a recount. The Greens held the seat but with a majority of only 10 votes. Lie polled 1,340 (45 per cent) and Brooks 1,330 (also 45 per cent). The others were far behind. The Verdict was not a victory for this Paul Newman, who came third with 127 votes (four per cent), ahead of the Lib Dem (106 votes), the Conservative (73 votes) and the Independent (10 votes).
The Greens had a majority of around 1,100 in May and the swing back to Labour was over 10 per cent, sufficient if repeated across the borough to build a large majority even if not Labour’s previous monopoly control. Turnout was 27 per cent, down from 51 per cent in May.
One should be beware of reading too much into the Crofton Park result. It might have been a particularly adverse result for the Greens given the local circumstances, but we will have more evidence about that shortly as there are five London by-elections next week, four of them Green vacancies.
It may be that Labour’s organisational strength in Lewisham meant that they were able to turn out more of their vote while the Greens were vulnerable to the drop in engagement and enthusiasm since the main elections in early May. But Crofton Park does suggest that the obituaries for Labour’s dominance of inner London might have been a bit premature.
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