The General Election has seen Labour strengthen its hold over the capital with 59 MPs, while the Liberal Democrats have doubled their total to 6 and the Conservatives slumped to just 9. The electoral map of London is thus almost all red, with a yellow bloc to the southwest and a few blue holdouts in the far corners.
But there is one place in London - just one - where constituencies of all three colours meet. I have of course been, and this is what that electoral triple point looks like.
It looks like a mess.
• In the foreground are five traffic cones, a locked gate, two portaloos and a skip piled high with wooden benches, surplus netting and a wheelbarrow. This is the constituency of Croydon West and it's held by Labour.
• The hedge to the left conceals a private gated development called Redstacks Court. The boundary bends round to include the pavement where I was standing. This is the constituency of Croydon South and it's held by the Conservatives.
• The trees in the background are part of the back garden of Pixie Cottage, the first house on a gravelly private road called Overhill Road. This is the constituency of Carshalton and Wallington and it's held by the Liberal Democrats.
We're in Purley, just to the north of the town centre, close to the junction of Highfield Road and Purley Way. The precise triple point (where playing field meets hedge meets back garden) is back left in my photo, pretty much exactly behind the upturned wheelbarrow. It's also sadly off-limits, the gates to the playing field being firmly locked, but that didn't stop me from exploring the three disparate constituencies to compare and contrast.
Croydon West
• Sarah Jones [Lab] 20,612 (54%)
• Simon Fox [Con] 6,386 (17%)
• Ria Patel [Green] 3,851 (10%)
This newconstituency includes Croydon town centre and stretches as far north as Thornton Heath. This however is the very southern tip, a long green tail hanging down towards Purley consisting entirely of recreational space. The skip at the tip is part of Thomas More Catholic School's playing field and at weekends is home to Shelton Athletic FC, a somewhat nomadic youth team originally based in Surrey. I assume they still play here anyway, because their website went very quiet last year which may explain the pile of soccer detritus in that skip. Thankfully most of the 100 acres of grass alongside Purley Way is fully accessible, and at this time of year the unmown part brims with brightly-coloured wildflowers and is absolutely glorious.
I weaved my way in through a patch of woodland at the end of Overhill Road where the edge of the constituency is marked by a 19th century Croydon Parish boundary post and a 21st century anti-motorbike barrier. In this remotest corner of Croydon West I found a carpet of buzzy clover, a pile of unwanted fence panels and my first two constituents... although they were two shaggy ponies and they didn't have a vote. From up here the horizon is expansive and dominated by the skyscrapers of central Croydon, but also visible is the distant upthrust of Nine Elms and the City cluster of silver spires. Only two of the dozens of public pitches were occupied during my visit, however, and the general ambience from the changing rooms and pavilions reeked of municipal abandonment.
You have to walk half a mile to find the constituency's first substantial building and that's a derelict warehouse. Next comes Costco (where non-skint constituents were queueing out of the door for bargains), then a TGI Fridays (which is probably what Sir Keir was thinking after the election). This being a Labour constituency there's culture in the form of the museum at the former Croydon airportterminal (open today, but all sold out) and also a bustling leisure park where these days the 'entertainment' is mostly food. Only when you reach Waddon Way do the suburban streets with actual electors begin, their first flank noticeably less prosperous than in the other two constituencies surrounding the triple point, which by now is a full mile distant.
Croydon South
• Chris Philp [Con] 19,757 (40%)
• Ben Taylor [Lab] 17,444 (35%)
• Richard Howard [Lib Dem] 4,384 (9%)
This constituency is well named, stretching south from South Croydon to Old Coulsdon at the southern tip of the borough. It includes the entire town of Purley and all its hilly fingers, a switchback of leafy avenues lightly lined by spacious detached houses. In the 1980s it was supposedly the home of Terry & June, the perfectly-pitched suburban sitcom couple (although all the exterior filming took place a few miles away in the constituency I'm writing about next). Up by the triple-point the avenues are particularly broad, especially out towards Woodcote, and the parish church has the dosh to display its name in neon. This is such quintessentially Tory territory that one £2m pile has both a Landrover Discovery and a Conservative election poster out front, one displayed less shamelessly than the other.
Education round here is dominated by private schools - so much so that all the little roadside adverts planted on roundabouts and verges feature smiling prep school pupils in impeccably smart uniforms. Even the nearest faith schools look private, locked away in a huge woody enclave at the top of Russell Hill. This is a street which undergoes a wild transformation from top to bottom, first big villas then an increasing number of building sites on their former footprints cramming in hundreds of highrise vernacular flats. The final crescent was massively upgraded when Purley Way was built, feeding Brighton-bound traffic past a Mock Tudor parade which even now caters for important right-wing needs by including a fireplace showroom, an Argentinian steakhouse and a Wetherspoons.
To see Conservative policies in action we need go no further than the gyratory island at Purley Cross. The local Baptist church worked out it could it make a tidy sum by shifting slightly and getting itself replaced by 220 flats (first phase affordable, second phase not), a scheme which will peak with a 17 storey 'landmark' tower. Meanwhile the library nextdoor limps on in a Grade II listed building that's seen better days and, amazingly for a town the size of Purley, now only opens two days a week. Ostensibly this is the fault of Croydon's multiply-bankrupt council and the Labour administration's budget mismanagement, but the ultimately source of the problem was a relentless funding squeeze by central government. Croydon South's constituents got what they voted for.
Carshalton and Wallington
• Bobby Dean [Lib Dem] 20,126 (43%)
• Elliot Colburn [Con] 12,221 (26%)
• Hersh Thaker [Lab] 6,108 (13%)
We switch boroughs for this third constituency, this being the eastern half of Sutton. It seems amazing that you can cross a hedge and suddenly find yourself in a safe Lib Dem constituency, but it only looks safe this weekend after three decades as a blue/orange marginal. At its eastern tip it's just as stockbroker belt as the adjacent Croydon avenues, kicking off by the triple point with the aforementioned private Overhill Road. This short road starts with a chain and a warning not to park here, and ends with a gauche mini-fortress with a veranda and space to park six cars, which its owner has self-consciously decided to name Dream Villa. You can tell cars are important round here because even the adverts for Purley Dental Practice don't mention how good they are with teeth, only that We Have Excellent Parking Facilities.
Find your way out past the school playing fields and you'll reach Roundshaw Downs, 90 acres of chalk grassland which again are currently a riot of long grasses and wild flowers. That's because they form a contiguous greenspace with the recreation ground in my first constituency with the Croydon/Sutton boundary running semi-imperceptibly between the two. And the sprawling similarity is because all this used to be the site of Croydon Aerodrome, later the first London Airport, which since the shift to Heath Row has been almost entirely erased apart from a few patches of apron. How typical of a Lib Dem stronghold that the heart of a carbon-belching planet killer should have been replaced by a wildlife haven ideal for walking the dog, several decades before anyone realised there was a problem.
On the far side is the Roundshaw Estate, a salutary reminder that not everyone round here lives comfortably. It was built in the late 1960s across the western tips of the two ex-runways and comprised well over 1000 council houses along streets and cul-de-sacs given suitably aeronautic names. Unfortunately the layout wasn't great and concrete cancer proved intractable so most of the flats and maisonettes have been substantially upgraded or entirely replaced. It must be better now because I spotted an Audi TT Coupé parked outside a fairly lowly end terrace on Brabazon Avenue and a few semi-smart dads cheering on their footballing offspring from Lindbergh Avenue. But this likely isn't the most Lib Dem patch of Carshalton and Wallington, indeed no constituency is a uniform stereotypical easily-generalised district, it all depends which way you look... as this lone triple point in south London confirms.
