Category: Semi-marginal Labour seat

Geography: Greater London. Part of the Southwark council area.

Main population centres: Bermondsey, Borough, Rotherhithe, Elephant & Castle and Surrey Quays.

Profile: This covers central London south of the river, facing the City of London across the Thames. The riverfront has undergone massive redevelopment and gentrification, and is now backed with offices, luxury apartments, the cultural quarter of Tate Modern and the Globe theatre and skyscrapers popping up around City Hall, whose crash helmet style home sits on the riverfront here. The seat also includes Guys Hospital and the fashionable Borough market. Alway from the trendy apartments to the north though, the rest of the area is still poor, racially mixed and struggling with problems of crime and deprivation though the process of regeneration of troubled estates like Heygate is rolling slowly onwards.

Politics: Demographically you would expect this seat to return a Labour MP: a poverty striken inner city seat, over 20% afro-carribean, over 40% of properties council owned. In fact it returned to the Labour party only in 2015, having been the Liberals and Liberal Democrats for over twenty years. Simon Hughes long tenure was probably due to his own performance as MP, but he only became the MP for Bermondsey in the first place because of the unusual circumstances of his election. The Bermondsey by-election must be one of the most infamous in recent political history. The local Labour party had selected as their PPC the left-winger Peter Tatchell, who was disowned by the then Labour leader Michael Foot. He was opposed by a Labour right-winger, John O`Grady, who stood as a "Real Labour" candidate and was backed by the former MP Bob Mellish. The by-election was notoriously dirty, Tatchell was consistently attacked for his sexuality, received hate mail and a bullet in the post. The Liberal party took the seat on an overwhelming swing and remained here for almost a quarter of a century.