Following Tuesday’s contest in Alperton ward in Brent, there were three more London by-elections on the usual election day of Thursday. Two were in Hammersmith & Fulham, one was in Barking & Dagenham and Labour were defending in all of three. Let’s start with the one in (Barking &) Dagenham because its name, Whalebone, is intriguing and unusual.
The story of Whalebone ward begins on 3 September 1685 when there was a storm along the Thames east of London. The wild conditions on the river deposited a whale, a rare visitor from the deep oceans trapped in the tidal river, in the marshes near Dagenham.
A dead whale was the object of practical interest for oil and its smaller bones, but also of curiosity. The owner of a large house a couple of miles north of the river acquired two huge bones from the whale, which he put up either side of the gateway of his estate. The house became known as Whalebone House, and the name was applied to local roads and the area around.
Whalebone House was destroyed in a bombing raid in 1941 but some items, including the whale bones, were donated to the local Valence House Museum. The bones stood outside the museum for a while but were eroded by acid rain and were put in storage. The whale’s legacy endures, 340 years after the unfortunate creature’s Thames mishap, on the political map of Barking & Dagenham.
Whalebone is north of Dagenham, part of the salient of the borough sticking up between Redbridge and Havering. It contains the neighbourhood of Becontree Heath, some streets north of the Valence area of Dagenham and a slice of Chadwell Heath south of the High Road.
It is served by Chadwell Heath station on the Elizabeth Line. Just outside the borders of the ward is the former Dagenham Civic Centre, now the London site of Coventry University – one of the results of Darren Rodwell’s policies as leader of the borough council from 2014 to 2024.
Whalebone is one of the more owner-occupied areas of a renting borough – 56 per cent – with 17 per cent social rent and 27 per cent private rent, mostly whole houses rather than flats. The Asian population large for the borough – 33 per cent, compared to 21 per cent black and 40 per cent white.
It also has more professional and managerial workers than average for the borough, a proportion that is likely to increase because of the Elizabeth Line connection. The housing is mostly inter-war public sector suburban, although there are some older terraced streets at the Chadwell Heath end of the ward, and some recent development.
The vacancy arose because of the death in November 2024 of Labour councillor Glenda Paddle, who had represented the ward since 2018. Paddle chaired the council’s overview and scrutiny committee and had served as a school governor since 1982. She worked as office manager for the trade union solicitors’ firm, Thompson’s. Council leader Dominic Twomey paid tribute to her as “selfless” and “a voice for people that didn’t have a voice”.
The borough elections in May 2022 were not competitive in Barking & Dagenham – Labour won every seat for the fourth time in a row – and certainly not in Whalebone, where Labour had a massive majority. Only one Conservative candidate stood against three Labour candidates, so Labour was guaranteed two seats before a single vote was cast.
Conservative opposition to Labour in Barking & Dagenham can score respectable shares of the vote in some circumstances, such as the 2021 London Mayoral elections and quite often in by-elections, but it struggles with the organisational challenge of fielding candidates in whole-borough elections. Labour’s dominance has only increased: back in 2002, the Residents’ Association won two seats out of three in Whalebone and in 2006 the two Tory candidates polled a highly respectable 45.4 per cent.
The Tories are not alone in not having sufficient candidates for their potential voters. In this week’s by-election Reform UK failed to stand despite the party’s relative strength in this north-eastern quadrant of London.
In the absence of Reform, candidates from the four other main parties stood in Whalebone. Three had stepped up in Barking & Dagenham by-elections on 28 November 2024 – Conservative Angelica Olawepo contested Northbury, while Liberal Democrat Herbert Munangatire and Green Tope Olawoyin fought Village ward on the same day. But none of them posed much of a threat to the chances of the electoral newcomer, Rubina Siddiqui (pictured, left), representing Labour, who prevailed with 625 votes (54.9 per cent).
The Conservatives retained second place with 287 votes (25.2 per cent), the Greens were third (117 votes, 10.3 per cent) and the Lib Dems fourth (109 votes, 9.6 per cent). Both Labour and Conservative shares of the vote were down and the net swing was 5.7 per cent to the Tories. Turnout was an abysmal 12.3 per cent.
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Thursday’s other two by-elections were in London’s other borough with an “and” in its name – Hammersmith & Fulham. One of was in Hammersmith, the other in Fulham.
Unlike Barking & Dagenham, Hammersmith & Fulham has been vigorously contested between the two main political parties, with Labour winning from 1986 to 2006, the Conservatives ruling from 2006 to 2014 and Labour winning the last three sets of borough elections.
It has recently been regarded as a “flagship” council by both parties, priding itself on low Council Tax and good services – it was a shock to the Tories when they lost it in 2014, but in the age of Brexit and culture wars it is not surprising that this affluent cosmopolitan borough has remained on the centre left.
Hammersmith Broadway is a compact and accurately-named ward. It is at the centre of Hammersmith, containing the Broadway shopping centre, the main shopping street of King Street, some commercial headquarters (including the Ark) and the borough’s Town Hall.
If you are driving along the A4, it is more or less the area that you fly over from start to finish of the Hammersmith Flyover. The elevated view is not unrepresentative of the ward – a commercial centre surrounded by large blocks of flats of varying vintage and ownership.
Many, particularly along Queen Caroline Street, were council-built but there are substantial Guinness Trust and Peabody estates too. More recently, the river frontage in the south of the ward has been built-up by upmarket developers; the population of the ward rose by 20 per cent between 2011 and 2021.
Hammersmith Bridge, closed to motor traffic since 2019, overshadows part of the ward, a reminder of failing infrastructure and lack of resources. The ward’s population is youthful (median age 31, and 76 per cent of working age) and ethnically diverse – only a third are white British.
It has a relatively high proportion of social renters (38 per cent) compared to private rent (37 per cent) and owner occupation (26 per cent), although the proportion of social rent fell from 48 per cent between the censuses of 2011 and 2021. It is a relatively deprived part of the borough and of London.
The cause of the by-election was the resignation of Labour councillor Emma Apthorp after being appointed to a job with the United Nations. Apthorp was first elected in 2022 but had a meteoric municipal career, becoming the youngest-ever (ceremonial) mayor of Hammersmith & Fulham shortly after being elected. Her successor as Labour candidate was Callum Nimmo, a public affairs consultant with Luther Pendragon, and he was the favourite in this safe Labour ward. The other four main parties all contested the election.
The result was mildly surprising – not for the winner (Nimmo polled 578 votes, 53.4 per cent) but for the way the opposition votes split. Reform candidate Anthony Goodwin (who stood for the London Assembly constituency of Ealing & Hillingdon last May) won his party’s first second place in a borough by-election, his 148 votes (13.7 per cent) narrowly pipping Conservative Nora Farah (144 votes) and Lib Dem Meerav Shah (135 votes). Colin Murphy for the Greens brought up the rear (77 votes). Turnout was 21.2 per cent.
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Lillie ward is north Fulham. It stretches from just north of Chelsea FC’s Stamford Bridge stadium to just south of the empty Earls Court development site, which might at last see some building starting in 2026. The London Oratory school is within its boundaries.
The ward takes its name from Lillie Road, which forms its northern border, which in turn took its name from John Scott Lillie who developed the area in the first half of the 19th Century. Part of its boundary runs along the “Wimbleware” branch of the District Line. West Brompton station is in the north east corner of the ward, but parts of the south look more towards Fulham Broadway.
Lillie ward was created in boundary changes in 2022. It is a reduced version (two councillors rather than three) of the old marginal Fulham Broadway ward which swung with control of the council (Labour 2002, 2014 and 2018, Conservative 2006 and 2010). The boundary changes saw most of the best Tory areas from that ward transferred elsewhere and Labour won a convincing 62.9 per cent of the vote in Lillie’s inaugural contest.
Demographically, Lillie is not unlike Hammersmith Broadway in some respects. It is a youthful ward (median age 32) with a high rate of employment and a white British population also of around a third – 24 per cent are “other white”, mostly from the European Union.
Thirty-eight per cent of households are social renting. But visually it presents a different picture. Most of Lillie ward consists of Victorian terraces off North End Road and Lillie Road subdivided into flats, a highly desirable residential area that gives the ward a rather affluent profile once one considers income and employment status.
Clem Attlee Court is the big exception to generalisations about the ward. It is a large 1960s council-built estate mixing high and low rise blocks of flats, with some recent redevelopment on a smaller scale. While Attlee predominates, blocks and roads are named after other figures from Labour history including Harold Wilson and Hugh Gaitskell.
A newer part of the estate is around John Smith Avenue. For much of its history the estate has provided a solid foundation for the Labour vote, but declining turnout and loyalty mean that it cannot account for the large Labour majority in the 2022 elections – the Victorian streets must have provided a substantial Labour vote in recent contests.
The Lillie by-election is the latest, but possibly not the last, London by-election to result from a councillor being elected to Parliament in the July 2024 General Election (I listed all the cases of this happening in a post back in September).
The constituency of Chelsea & Fulham was one of the tougher nuts for Labour to crack, not so much because it had a large Conservative majority but because of the deep-dyed, low-swing Conservatism of some of London’s wealthiest residential areas and a more effective local Tory organisation than most.
But Ben Coleman prevailed over incumbent Greg Hands by a majority of 152 votes, and he has stepped down from Hammersmith & Fulham council, where he had previously been deputy leader and a councillor since 2014.
Four candidates stood in the Lillie by-election. Lydia Paynter, campaign manager for the development charity Malaria No More, was defending for Labour. She won (466 votes, 40.4 per cent), but the fall in the Labour vote since the full borough elections in May 2022 was the worst so far in 2025 – 22.5 per cent.
The Conservatives’ Matt Sinclair performed creditably, winning 352 votes (30.5 per cent) and making Lillie look almost marginal. The swing from Labour to Conservative was 13.7 per cent. The 2022 starting point in this ward might be an unusually good election for Labour and the swing therefore a bit exaggerated, but it is still a bad result for Labour in a majority middle-class ward.
Lib Dem Conor Campbell was third (212 votes, 18.4 per cent) and Reform’s Peter Hunter was fourth (123 votes, 10.7 per cent – not all that much less than in Hammersmith Broadway). Turnout was 24 per cent.
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