At the IHR Parliaments, Politics and People seminar on Tuesday 19 May, Dr Jeremy Crump of the Institute of Historical Research, will be discussing parliamentary politics in the London boroughs between 1832 and 1868.

The seminar takes place on 19 May 2026, between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

Before 1832, London sent eight MPs to Parliament – four for the City and two each for Westminster and Southwark. The 1832 reform legislation extended Westminster and Southwark’s boundaries and created five new double-member constituencies within the metropolitan area (Lambeth, Greenwich, Tower Hamlets, Finsbury and Marylebone). This meant London returned 18 MPs to the Commons between 1832 and 1868. Four of the five largest new boroughs created by the 1832 reform legislation, according to registered voters, were in London.

The creation of new seats for London was resisted by anti-reformers and Tories during 1831 and 1832. They feared that the effect of the £10 household franchise in London would amount to universal suffrage and that there would be a body of MPs, who would, in the words of the Marquis of Chandos, ‘form the germs of great excitement whenever any popular question shall be at issue’.

Despite these predictions, after 1832 the effect of registration and ratepaying requirements meant that the proportion of qualified electors in London fell far short of the adult male population. In Southwark, which had a total population of 193,600 in 1867, there were only 11,600 registered electors. Turnout at elections was often low. At the 1865 Lambeth election only 12,000 of 22,000 registered electors voted.

The fear of the Commons being overwhelmed by metropolitan demagogues proved misplaced. However, there was a further fear, shared by Whigs and Tories in 1831 and 1832, that the equalisation of electoral districts would give London too much influence in Parliament. It was argued that Parliament represented interests, not numbers, and that London’s interests were represented by the 100 or so MPs resident in London but who sat for other constituencies.

57 of 72 Metropolitan seats (80%) were contested in general elections between 1832 and 1865. Of the 41 by-elections in London between the first two Reform Acts, 23 (56%) were contested. If by-elections for those holding public office are excluded from this figure, it rises to 82%. 30% of seats at general elections and 23% of the by-elections (excluding public office cases) were contested between rival Liberals alone. By contrast, the proportion of seats contested at general elections nationally in the 1830s was never greater than 32%.

Nominations were usually spectacularly well-attended. The crowds for the Lambeth hustings at Kennington Common at the 1852 general election were said to be larger than those for the Chartist demonstration there in 1848.  

Contested London elections were also expensive. At the 1854 Marylebone by-election, the Whig candidate, Viscount Ebrington, spent £5,000, while Jacob Bell, a local pharmaceutical chemist, spent £3,000. Dudley Stuart spent £7,000 in the same constituency in 1847 at a by-election which was cited by the National and Constitutional Association as an example of unacceptable cost and exclusivity.

Despite this, there were few petitions against the results of London elections. Sir Samuel Whalley was the only London MP unseated during the period, for failure to prove his property qualification. The petition against William Roupell’s election in Lambeth in 1857, in which he declared expenditure of £11,000, was astonishingly declared frivolous and vexatious.

Formal organisation of the Liberal party occurred later in London than elsewhere in England. In the absence of national or even metropolitan political machinery, there were shifting patterns of reform and registration associations. Candidates needed to come to an accommodation with the local politicians that controlled these associations – or spend enough money to overpower their influence. Skilful management of these relationships could sustain an MP’s support, even covering up for inattention to constituency business. Charles Tennyson spent as little time as he needed to in London and less in Lambeth, but kept the support of his constituency backers for twenty years.

Between 1832 and 1867 London Conservatives contested only 35 of 70 seats in general elections, and 14 of 28 by-elections. They won only four seats at general elections and three at by-elections. Writing in 1900 about London in the 1850s, Lord Salisbury recalled the time when ‘London was the highest expression of Liberal enthusiasm … We had no chance in those days’. Only after the 1884-5 reform legislation did the Conservatives come to dominate parliamentary representation in London.

The centrality of London, the energy of its political life and the lack of controlling interests meant that the metropolitan constituencies attracted great interest among potential Liberal candidates. London elections were preceded by extensive press speculation about who had shown an interest in standing, and the list of hopeful candidates was often a long one.

London’s MPs

The 83 successful candidates (7 Conservatives, the rest Whigs, Liberals and radicals) who represented London constituencies between 1832 and 1868 were drawn from a wide variety of backgrounds and geographical origins. A significant number of MPs and candidates had local business interests including manufacturing (Frederick Doulton [Lambeth], Benjamin Hawes [Lambeth] and Apsley Pellatt [Southwark]), shipbuilding (Edward George Barnard [Greenwich], Peter Rolt [Greenwich]) and the building trade (James Lawrence –[Lambeth]).

Others were bankers (Baron Lionel de Rothschild [London]) and merchants (John Humphery [Southwark], Thomas Challis [London]).  A number were career politicians with private means, such as Lord John Russell [London], Thomas Slingsby Duncombe [Finsbury] and William Molesworth [Southwark]. The soldier George De Lacy Evans [Westminster] and the sailors James Whitley Deans Dundas [Greenwich] and Charles Napier [Southwark] combined parliamentary careers with active service.

There were also radical politicians without significant private means for whom the need to earn a living meant they were ultimately unable to sustain a political career. These included Daniel Whittle Harvey, MP for Southwark, who was a journalist, registrar of metropolitan public carriages and commissioner of the City of London police. Charles Pearson, who was MP for Lambeth, was a City solicitor and Thomas Wakley, MP for Finsbury, was coroner of Middlesex.

Many London MPs had been members of the common council, several were aldermen of the City, and nine became lord mayor. Eleven London MPs held government office during this period, which proved a source of tension with radical electors. These voters were suspicious of careerism among MPs and the exertion of central control over local interests.

Then there were those who were known frauds or bankrupts. The cases against Roupell [Lambeth] and Edwin James [Finsbury] were notorious. Doulton escaped the Belgian courts on a technicality for manipulating contracts for the Brussels sewers. John Harvey Lewis, MP for Marylebone, became enmeshed in the collapse of the National Bank of Ireland, while Apsley Pellatt suffered from his involvement with the failed British Bank.

London politics in the Commons

London MPs played an important role in infrastructural and regulatory matters affecting the capital on account of the absence of a pan-metropolitan authority, and the virtual exclusion of London from the 1835 Municipal Corporations Act and 1848 Public Health Act. Parliamentary debates on London governance did lead to the 1853 royal commission on the City of London and the 1855 Management of the Metropolis Act 1855.

London was also a topic of regular debate in the Commons. These debates included discussion about taxes on coal that had landed in the port of London, sanitation, the Embankment, London’s railways, road and bridge tolls, the metropolitan cattle market and the equalisation of poor law rates. Some issues, which were of radical interest nationally, were more acute in London, notably debates on the house and window taxes, the Sunday opening of museums and the Crystal Palace, as well as Sunday trading.

There were issues that united London MPs in the Commons, but alliances were tenuous and there was no common programme. Others issues proved the subject of conflict between London MPs – such as the issue of poor rate equalisation.

Metropolitan MPs largely eschewed any broader vision for the future of London which considered the consequences of the capital’s rapid expansion. There were those who were critical of the effect of railway development for the poorest parts of the city. Others, such as William Arthur Wilkinson, MP for Lambeth, were enthusiastic promoters of railway development and resisted attempts to mitigate its effects on the poor. Charles Pearson was unusual in setting out a vision for the development of new commuter suburbs connected to the centre via underground railways. However, most of this work was largely completed after he left Parliament in 1850.

After 1849, London’s Liberal MPs made the case for more seats for the metropolis, but with little fervour. John Bright’s reform bill of 1859 proposed to split the largest boroughs, but debate on these proposals focussed primarily on the franchise.

Opposition to increasing the number of London seats made much of the supposed poor quality of London MPs. The Conservative newspaper the Standard claimed that a metropolitan constituency was ‘simply a convenience for smart renegades and aspiring mediocrities, or else a refuge for the distressed and the rejected of other constituencies’. The convicted fraudster William Roupell and the disgraced lawyer Edwin James were held up as examples of the worst type of this corruption.

The journalist and constitutional theorist, Walter Bagehot, argued that the election of intellectual radicals to London seats at the 1865 election, such as John Stuart Mill [Westminster], Thomas Hughes [Lambeth] and Austen Layard [Southwark] marked a significant generational shift in the composition of the House. This shift was not sustained, however. Hughes’s victory was cited as evidence in support of manhood suffrage in the 1865-67 reform campaign. Nevertheless, London gained only four more seats (two each for Hackney and Chelsea) under the 1867 Reform Act and was not to be represented in proportion to its population until 1885, when redistribution allocated the metropolis 59 seats.

JC

The seminar takes place on 19 May 2026, between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.