This year’s local elections mostly bypassed London. They took place mainly in the shire counties of England, as the capital took a year off between the Mayor and Assembly races of 2024 and next year’s full round of borough contests. But two by-elections to fill vacancies on borough councils took place yesterday, one in one in Redbridge and the other in Lambeth. Each provided a glimpse of different aspects of London’s complex electoral scene.
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While Labour’s luck was out in the Runcorn & Helsby parliamentary by-election, losing the seat to Reform UK by six votes, a small consolation for the party was that its toast landed buttered-side up in the Redbridge Council ward of Hainault – the Labour line held by a single-vote margin.
Hainault is on the north-east periphery of Greater London, in the north east corner of a north eastern borough. For centuries, the area was all forest. The long, straight main New North Road was originally a logging track. The ward’s exotic-looking name has nothing to do with the Belgian province of Hainaut, and is a modification of the 13th Century name Hyne Holt, meaning a woodland owned by a religious community.
In the 20th Century, developers started to eye up this tract north of the burgeoning suburban town of Ilford, and a branch of the Great Eastern Railway opened in 1903. But lack of passengers caused that the close over the period from 1908 to 1930, and change not really take hold until important decisions were taken in in the 1940s: in 1948, the sleepy little railway line to Hainault and Woodford was incorporated into London Transport’s Central Line, and development accelerated massively with the purchase by the London County Council (LCC) of a parcel of land in the area, with the intention of building a large housing estate to accommodate overcrowded and bombed-out Londoners.
Despite post-war austerity, construction moved ahead rapidly, and between 1947 and 1953 a Hainault community, like a small New Town, was constructed from scratch. The design of the estate was low-density, based on family houses that not very different from those built in mid-century, privately-developed suburbia. The street layout incorporated grassy verges.
It was a realistic utopia, a planned working-class community with clean air, community facilities and spacious houses. Hainault was one of the first places where the more affluent council tenants’ aspirations to home ownership were met, when the Conservative-controlled Greater London Council (GLC) instituted one of the first programmes of council house sales there in the early 1970s.
Hainault’s electoral history is interesting and reflects broader social and political trends. After the estate’s construction, it was for decades a formidable Labour stronghold. The ward stuck with the party even in its local election nadir in 1968, and in the borough elections of 1971 over 3,000 people turned out to vote for the Labour slate. Hainault was also the foundation for Labour’s wins in the then-Tory inclined Ilford North constituency in October 1974 and 1997.
But council house sales and changing attitudes among the white working-class brought the Conservatives into closer contention, and Labour’s dominance ended in 2002 when the Conservatives topped the poll and won two out of three Hainault seats. And there were even more shocks to come: the British National Party (BNP) stood one candidate in 2006 and he came in first, sharing representation with two Conservatives.
The Tories ejected the BNP in 2010, but it was remarkable that, on a general election turnout, only around 1,500 voters were now turning out for Labour. The party regained all three Hainault seats in its first-time Redbridge borough win in 2014, but UKIP, to which one sitting Tory councillor had defected, took a 26 per cent share. The ward has since remained marginal between Labour and the Tories, with straight two-party fights there in 2018 and 2022. But there is clearly a strong populist-right tradition in the ward.
The 2021 Census showed that Hainault has come a long way from its origins, demonstrating that even planned communities evolve. It is now only 25 per cent social rented and majority owner-occupied. Also, despite its reputation as a white area, it has become more ethnically diverse. Today, the white population stands at 58 per cent and that of Asian heritage accounts for 22.5 per cent, of whom 17 per cent are Muslim.
The by-election arose following the arrest of incumbent Labour councillor Samuel Gould for indecent exposure and his subsequent resignation. He has since received a suspended prison sentence. The big five parties, plus an Independent, stood to replace him. Labour’s defence was in the hands of Helen Mullis, project leader at the Christian Educational Project.
She squeaked home with 835 votes (28.8 per cent). The drop in Labour’s share was its second worst in London in 2025 so far – only in a previous Redbridge by-election, in Mayfield ward last month, has it fared worse – and Mullis’s win in spite of this owes much to a three-way division in the right wing vote.
In total, this attracted 64.4 per cent of the votes cast, but was split between Conservative Theresa Blohm, Reform UK’s Raj Forhad, who last year stood in both Ilford South in the general election and Wanstead Park in a by-election, and, thirdly, Independent Glen Haywood. a local civic activist and animal rescuer, who had stood as part of the Conservative slate in Hainault in May 2022 but has since left the party.
Haywood’s election pitch was nostalgic and Reform-like, saying he wanted to “bring Hainault back to the great community and area it was when I first moved here” 23 years ago. He painted a grim picture of modern Hainault as a crime-ridden, fear-stalked area where fly-tipping is rampant.
One may speculate about why Haywood, whose campaign was described by local Labour MP Wes Streeting as “brilliant and clean”, did better than Forhad in appealing to right-wing voters in a ward that once elected a BNP councillor. Haywood’s appeal, as a well-known local, may also have gone beyond the Right. He fell one vote short with 834. Forhad came third with 611 votes (21.1 per cent) and Blohm, fourth (421 votes, 14.5 per cent). The Greens (125 votes) and the Liberal Democrats (73 votes) were nowhere.
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Thursday’s other by-election was in Lambeth. Herne Hill & Loughborough Junction is a cumbersome but accurate name for a slice of inner south London that encompasses the areas around the Thameslink stations from which the ward takes its name. It covers a large land area due to containing a lot of railway land plus two big open spaces in Brockwell Park and Ruskin Park.
A less punctilious Boundary Commission might have called it Brixton East, for it is indeed to the east of central Brixton, whose own ward was given the more poetic and allusive name of Brixton Windrush. It lies along the border with Southwark.
Inner London wards are almost always more of a patchwork than outer London wards, which often, like Hainault, have a dominant character that arises from the circumstances and era in which they were built. Herne Hill is the sort of area that gets dubbed “leafy”. It has always been desirable thanks to its suburban housing and green parks.
By contrast, to its north, Loughborough Junction has historically been a scruffier. It was here, at 144 Coldharbour Lane, that a young John Major lived during a period of poverty. In 1992, he return to film a party election broadcast. The forces of gentrification have colonised the hinterland of Coldharbour Lane, even if the main road remains a bit rougher. Near Herne Hill station, the ward also includes a small section of Railton Road to the west of the railway line. It is almost unrecognisable from its early 1980s role as the Front Line.
The demographics of the ward reveal its mixed character. It is 56 per cent white – which is high for the area and only two points less than Hainault, despite the contrasting reputations of Brixton and outer council-built estates – 23 per cent black and eight per cent mixed race. These, too, are high proportions. Its Asian population, meanwhile, is below the England average, let alone London’s.
It is a youthful area, with a population bulge between 20 and 40, and highly educated – 62 per cent to degree level. It has a large proportion of people with managerial and professional jobs (49 per cent compared to 32 per cent in England as a whole). It would not be stretching the truth much to define it as a “yuppie” ward. However, 31 per cent of households are renting in the social sector, in smaller blocks scattered around the ward and in a larger estate at its northern tip, near Camberwell. There are 29 per cent in private renting, including the neglected Art Deco Dorchester Court in Herne Hill.
The by-election arose from the election of long-serving local Labour councillor Jim Dickson as the MP for Dartford – he gained the traditional bellwether Kent constituency, which had looked a very long shot judging by the 2019 results, with a swing of over 17 per cent. Dickson had first been elected in the Herne Hill ward in 1990 and led the council for a period after 1994.
Candidates to succeed him came forward from the five main parties and two smaller left-wing ones, the Socialist Party of Great Britain (SPGB), which was founded in 1904 and has its headquarters in Clapham, and the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC), which was the brainchild of the late RMT leader Bob Crow and is a more frequent participant in local elections.
Labour’s defence was conducted by human rights lawyer Stephen Clark, but the Greens were always going make a strong challenge, even had the national picture been less cloudy for Labour: in 2022, the ward had seen the third highest Green share in Lambeth (38 per cent), and the Greens had topped the poll in the predecessor Herne Hill ward in 2018.
The Green candidate was actor and trade unionist Paul Valentine (pictured) and the Green message emphasised – with the help of Lib Dem-style bar charts – that the contest was between them and Labour. Campaign issues included the local Carnegie Library, housing redevelopment and the war in Gaza, as well as general London issues.
As expected, the Greens were victorious. Valentine was elected with 1,774 votes (47.7 per cent), with Labour on 1,459 (39.2 per cent). It was a clear though not overwhelming victory in a marginal ward. Labour’s vote share dropped by a relatively mild 10.8 percentage points compared to May 2022, and the swing from Labour to Green was 10 per cent rather than the 18 per cent of three weeks ago in Haringey St Ann’s. All the other parties polled poorly.
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The wards featured in the two by-elections represent microcosms of a larger debate about the direction of the Labour Party. Is it the party of Hainault – working-class, socially conservative, contested with the Conservatives and Reform? Or is it the party of Herne Hill – middle-class mixed with poor, educated, young and professional, to be contested with the Greens (or Lib Dems)?
In the 2022 borough elections Labour was clearly both of those things, if by narrow margins. On the evidence of 2025, it is neither. Taken together, the results are a conundrum. In Hainault, the vote share plunged but the party held on for a flukey victory because of confusion on the right. In Herne Hill & Loughborough Junction, the seat was lost despite a relatively small Labour decline. Labour’s council and mayoral hopefuls will look at Lambeth and find the prospect not without hope. Labour’s national strategists will look at Hainault and probably take false comfort.
Support OnLondon.co.uk and its writers for just £5 a month or £50 a year and get things for your money that other people don’t. Details HERE. Follow Lewis Baston on Bluesky. Photo from Paul Valentine campaign video.