The year 2024 was an important one in London for elections. It was the first year in which both a general election and elections for Mayor of London and the London Assembly took place. There was also a steady stream of by-elections for borough council seats, contests which have generally seen poor results for whichever party was in national government at the time. The very last of these took place on Thursday 19 December with a by-election in the Greenwich Council ward of West Thamesmead.
Thamesmead is one of London’s lesser-known but most distinctive suburban towns, straddling the boundary between the boroughs of Greenwich and Bexley. The Greater London Council (GLC) started construction in the area in the late 1960s on a huge area of Plumstead Marshes that had been recently vacated by the Royal Ordnance Factory.
The site was a warren of small factories and arms testing ranges, scattered among the marshy terrain downriver from Woolwich. It was cleared and landscaped, though the planners took care to preserve lakes and channels to serve as water features for the new urban quarter. Thamesmead’s name was chosen in a public competition. In the late 1960s, people took such things seriously enough for this to be worthwhile, resulting in a sensible outcome rather than, say, “Marshy McMarshface”.
The GLC’s hopes for Thamesmead were not entirely fulfilled. The original plans had an international yacht harbour on the river and a long ribbon of tall apartment blocks with views over the Thames, and it is now undergoing a major regeneration. But it developed into a stable, mainly working-class, community and has become more connected to the rest of London since the opening of the Elizabeth line, with its stations at Woolwich and Abbey Wood.
The two-member ward of West Thamesmead was created by boundary changes in 2022, drawing on territory previously in the Thamesmead and Glyndon wards. It is well-defined in terms of physical and social geography, separated from the rest of Thamesmead by green spaces and from Woolwich and Plumstead by local history and major roads.
Housing in this section of Thamesmead is mostly low-rise, rather than the concrete estates further east. There is a mixture of tenures – 25 per cent social rent, 27 per cent mortgaged, 40 per cent private rented or rent free and seven per cent owned outright. Like much of south east London, the population is mostly white (39 per cent) or black (38 per cent) with relatively few of Asian heritage (11 per cent).
A fluctuating total of between 1,200 and 1,500 residents of Thamesmead West, a bit over 10 per cent of the total population, are not on the electoral register because they are inmates at two prisons, Belmarsh and Isis (the latter derived from an alternative name for the River Thames). The population statistics are a bit distorted as a result. For instance, the 2021 Census found that 54 per cent of residents were male.
There was an interesting background to the by-election, ably set out by Darryl Chamberlain for the Greenwich Wire local website. To summarise, one of the incumbent West Thamesmead councillors Chris Lloyd, elected for Labour in 2022 and before that a Peninsula ward councillor since 2014, fell out with the Greenwich Labour group in December 2023 and alleged that one of its councillors had made a homophobic remark to him.
Leaving Labour, Lloyd initially sat as an Independent and subsequently joined the Liberal Democrats. But he resigned from the council this autumn as a result of moving out of London to be closer to his family in Wales.
Lloyd’s defection had given the Lib Dems their only seat on the council, and they waged a vigorous campaign to defend it. Greenwich has long been stony ground for the party despite its antecedent, the original Social Democratic Party, having had two MPs in the borough in the 1980s. But Lloyd’s time as a Lib Dem councillor had sowed a few seeds of revival.
His successor as candidate was Steve Day, who emerged as the main opposition in a ward that had been overwhelmingly Labour in the 2022 borough elections. Day chairs the 1,000-member residents’ association at Royal Artillery Quays in the west of the ward, which adjoins the recently-redeveloped older section of the Arsenal next to Woolwich town centre.
The development has been troubled, with residents campaigning successfully to get funding for the removal of substandard cladding from properties there, although there is unhappiness that the work is yet to start. The cladding issue and high service charges on the estate gave the Lib Dem campaign a strong foundation in that part of the ward, but it had less resonance in its other neighbourhoods. Day polled a creditable 336 votes (33 per cent) on a 20-point swing, but it was not enough in what had become a two-party contest in a ward with deep-rooted Labour loyalties.
The winner was Labour’s Jahdia Spencer, with 464 votes (45 per cent). The Labour machine in Greenwich is well-organised and in gear following three other recent by-elections, as well as the big contests in May and July. The council’s membership now stands at 51 Labour councillors and four Conservatives.
Spencer brings youth – she is 26 – and enthusiasm to the council, and she is also one of very few Bermudians to be active in British politics. She told Bermuda’s Royal Gazette, “I want to show Bermudians, and young people across the world, that we can achieve anything we set our minds to.”
The other parties were squeezed out: Ruth Handyside for Reform UK came third with 92 votes (nine per cent), Siama Qadar for the Conservatives was fourth with 82 votes (eight per cent) and Anji Petersen for the Greens – who had finished second in 2022 – brought up the rear with 55 votes (five per cent). Reform in particular will be disappointed with their performance compared to their October result in Belvedere ward, which is on the Bexley side of the borough boundary but not far from West Thamesmead. Turnout in this chilly pre-Christmas poll was a low 14.9 per cent.
Next year will be a fallow one for elections – the next big crop will be the full borough elections in May 2026. But there will be by-elections during the first eleven months of 2025 to provide us with (possibly misleading) straws in the wind about the state of politics across London and its intricate local variations. This column wishes its readers and the politicians of London and Happy Christmas and all the best for the New Year.
Support OnLondon.co.uk and its freelancers 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 Greenwich leader Anthony Okereke’s X/Twitter feed.