The 7 May result gave Zoe Garbett the mayoralty, handed Shoreditch and Hoxton to a new party, and showed what multi-member wards do to a swing
Shoreditch woke up on 8 May 2026 in a different political country. At the count, the Greens had won 42 of Hackney Council’s 57 seats. According to the Hackney Citizen’s report of 11 May, Labour was reduced to nine, and the Conservatives kept six. The paper reports that the Greens won the directly elected mayoralty for the first time: Zoe Garbett received 35,720 votes to Labour’s Caroline Woodley’s 26,865. Wikipedia’s account of the election puts the Green vote share at 43.1 percent, or 84,172 votes, and Labour’s at 35.7 percent, or 69,676. A 43 percent vote produced 74 percent of the seats, which is the part that needs explaining.
How the Arithmetic Works
The explanation is in the voting system. The Hackney Citizen’s analysis of 2 July, which says Labour fell from 50 seats at the previous election, notes that the borough’s multi-member first-past-the-post wards let a party with a narrow lead win every seat in a ward. In 2022 Labour won 50 seats on 53.4 percent of the vote, while the Greens won two seats on 23 percent. The same rule that flattered Labour for decades then worked for the Greens. The Greens first won Hackney seats in 1998, regained a foothold in 2006 and built a base in central wards with younger, renter-heavy, graduate-leaning populations. A by-election gain in Stoke Newington in September 2024, with a swing of more than 19 points from Labour, took their group to three, and three Labour councillors then broke away to form an independent socialist grouping.
The article is careful to say that the evidence cannot show how much each local factor moved individual voters. It does record that Labour’s long tenure built up resentment, that Mayor Philip Glanville resigned in 2023, and that discontent over low traffic neighbourhoods had already fuelled independent challenges in 2022. The Greens, with no record in office, could absorb the dissatisfaction. It also records Gaza as a particularly charged issue in Hackney. The national picture was fragmented, with Labour losing close to 1,500 seats and, in inner London, its departing voters going mainly to the Greens rather than Reform UK. Hackney, Lewisham and Waltham Forest were the only London boroughs where the Greens took outright control.
What the Winners Said
The Green leader, Zack Polanski, spoke alongside Garbett at the count and said: ‘Two-party politics is no longer dying – it is dead.’ Garbett called the mayoralty the start of the fightback. Labour’s response was blunter. Ben Lucas, one of the few re-elected Labour councillors, said: ‘Hackney Labour will be holding the borough’s new administration to account and we’re well up for the fight.’ The outgoing mayor, Woodley, congratulated Garbett but addressed her remarks to Westminster: ‘To my Labour government, you’ve got a lot of work to do.’ Those are the words the paper reported, and they show the shape of the argument for the next four years.
What Happened in Hoxton West
For readers in Shoreditch, the nearest example is Hoxton West. The Hackney Citizen reports that Lucas finished second there with 1,200 votes, behind the Green Nicholas Blincoe, and that the Labour cabinet member Carole Williams lost her seat in the same ward. Wikipedia’s ward table records the borough’s lowest turnout in Hoxton West, at about 31.8 percent, against 48.1 percent in Stoke Newington. That gap is worth thinking about. A landslide in a ward where fewer than a third of voters took part is a mandate of a particular kind, and the winners will want to make sure the other two thirds feel included.
Our own short report on Green Party gains and our note on Britain holding local elections cover the national mood with their usual lightness. The local facts are the ones in the paper.
Inheriting the Pile
The Greens inherit a good deal. The July analysis lists a housing repairs backlog, disputes over parks and parking, and union negotiations that had strained Labour. Its closing line is a warning that the plurality-based system could amplify future swings: ‘A majority this large is a mandate and a hostage at once.’ In practice that means the Greens now own every complaint about the borough. Bins, potholes, the waiting list for a council house and the traffic schemes in Hoxton, which we cover elsewhere, are theirs.
Our look at how the London Borough of Hackney continues reinventing itself loudly describes the borough’s habit of changing its mind in public. A council with 42 of 57 seats can change a great deal quickly, and it can be blamed for it just as quickly.
What to Watch
Three things deserve attention. First, how the new administration handles the practical business of running services, which the voters will judge before they judge ideology. Second, how Labour, reduced to nine seats, chooses to oppose. Third, whether the Greens’ majority holds together over a full term, since large majorities have their own internal politics.
The residents of Shoreditch, Hoxton and the streets around them did not change address on 8 May. They changed who answers the phone at the Town Hall. That is a smaller change than the headlines suggest and a larger one than the postcode does.
For more on how London votes and argues, see our London news in Hackney, and for the wider magazine visit Bohiney Magazine. For a lighter angle on the count, The Daily Mash has the right tone. As for the new administration, the first test is not a manifesto but a bin collection.
SOURCE: bohiney.com
