Local Election Maps

[YL]

The 2010 election had a few strange features: Labour gained Edenthorpe, Kirk Sandall and Barnby Dun with just 24.0% of the vote, which is the lowest winning score I can remember seeing in a UK local election.  The full shares of the vote were Lab 24.0 LD 23.3 C 20.3 EDP 16.2 Ind 16.2, the English Democrats and the defending Independent councillor tying for last place with 1,100 votes each.

Not far away, the BNP win in Maltby (Rotherham) in 2008 was on 23.1%.  (According to a certain very useful website for past local election results.)

[YL]

Here are my Sheffield maps from 2last year again:

Sheffield winning party, 2011:


Lib Dem to Labour swing, 2010 to 2011:

(Shades are 0 to 4%, 4% to 8%, etc., up to 16% to 20%, using the British definition of "swing")

Vote share maps, 2011:


(Shades are in increments of 10% for Labour and the Lib Dems and 5% for the Tories and the Greens; the darkest Labour shade is 70% to 80% and the darkest Lib Dem share 40% to 50%.)

[YL]

Inspired by Leftbehind's post, here's another Sheffield map, this time the LD to Lab swing from 2007 to 2011.  Neither year was a general election year, perhaps making them a bit more comparable, and the same seats were up, so many of the candidates were the same.  The colour scale is the same as on the previous swing map, except that I needed a 20% to 24% shade for Crookes; at the other end of the scale Beauchief & Greenhill was very close to requiring a pale yellow.

[YL]

Crookes is mostly from the old Hallam ward, right?

Yes, though a significant part in the east came from Netherthorpe and a smaller area in the north-east from Walkley.

The Council website has pages for each ward with PDF maps which show the old ward boundaries, e.g.
https://www.sheffield.gov.uk/your-city-council/elections/ward-boundaries/crookes.html

[YL]

[img]Yorkshire & The Humber.

Nice, but you've switched Ecclesall and East Ecclesfield.

[YL]

Question regarding Coldfield - if you'd have been told before the election that Labour would win a seat in Sutton, would you have guessed Vesey as the least unlikely of the four? Or not even that?

Vesey would always have been the most likely Labour win; it's basically humdrum suburbia these days rather than bourgeois clichéland, there's an increasingly public sector feel to the especially affluent bits (which obviously matters a great deal right now; see also the semi-hilarious emergence of Red Harborne), and Labour have run the same candidate (Rob Pocock, who's well known and well liked) for ages. This is like 70% a personal triumph for him or something.

IIRC all the Sutton Coldfield wards stayed Tory throughout the 1994-96 nadir for them, but weren't there boundary changes in that area in 2004?  Did Vesey exist in anything like its current form?

In Sheffield, I believe this year was the first time Labour had ever won a seat with "Beauchief" in its name, and that many areas in Beauchief & Greenhill have a Labour councillor for the first time ever.  But that isn't quite as impressive as it sounds (though winning it was still impressive) as the ward has only existed in anything like its current form since 2004; the old Beauchief ward was quite different.