Every UK general election from the Great Reform Act of 1832 to July 2024, on one map you can play through: who won each seat, by how much, how many turned out, and which seats nobody bothered to contest.
Pick any town in Britain or Ireland and ask a simple question: who has it sent to Westminster? The answer runs through Whigs and Tories, Peelites and Liberal Unionists, Home Rulers and Sinn Féin, Labour, the SNP and Reform. This map puts all 49 general elections since 1832 in one place: 31,736 seats filled, 89,545 candidacies, 2,042 constituency names. Each dot is a seat, coloured by the party family that won it. Two-member seats get two dots.
Drag the slider or press play. Tap a dot for the full result and for a strip showing who has won nearest that spot at every election since 1832. Search for a town to jump straight to it.
Dots sit at a point for each constituency (its Wikidata coordinates, or its town or county) and are spread apart so that none overlap, so London and the big cities swell. They are not boundaries. Results: UK Parliament, House of Commons Library.
Read left to right. Until the 1880s the Commons is a two-party room of Whigs and Liberals against Tories and Conservatives, with a green wedge of Irish members from 1874. The Liberals won 397 seats in 1906. By 1951 the Liberal family was down to 6. Labour won its first seats in 1900 (as the Labour Representation Committee), passed the Liberals in 1922, and won a majority of seats for the first time in 1945, with 394 of 640.
Share of seats won by each party family, every general election
Bars are spaced by date. Hover or tap for the numbers.
Seats and votes rarely match under first past the post. In 2024 Labour won 63.2% of seats on 33.7% of the votes counted here; Reform UK took 14.3% of the votes and 5 seats. In 1983 the Liberal and SDP Alliance won 25.4% of the votes and 23 seats.
Share of votes cast in contested seats
Every vote counted; before 1950 electors in two-member seats had two votes. Seats with no contest add nothing.
For much of the nineteenth century a general election did not mean a vote everywhere. If no rival came forward, the candidates were simply returned. Between 1832 and 1880, 40.1% of all seats were filled that way, and in 1859 it was 380 seats, 58.1% of the House. The last unopposed returns at a general election came in 1951, when 4 members were returned without a vote. Switch the map to Unopposed to see where.
Seats returned unopposed, share of all seats
Many seats also had two members. In 1832, 505 of the 658 seats were in constituencies electing two or more, and from 1832 to 1880, 33.9% of two-member seats returned one member from each side. Most double seats went in 1885; the last were abolished after 1945. The story of the boroughs that lost their members in 1832 is in my Rotten Boroughs study.
Wales was almost wholly Liberal before the First World War: 33 of its 34 seats in 1906 (counting Monmouthshire), on 63.1% of the vote. Labour took over, with 32 of 36 in 1966. The Conservatives won no Welsh seat at all in 1906, 1997 and 2001.
Scotland sent 58 Liberals out of 72 members in 1906. In 1955 the Unionists won 31 Scottish seats on 41.6% of the vote. Labour then held most Scottish seats until the SNP took 56 of 59 in 2015 on 50.0% of the vote; in 2024 Labour won 37 of 57 and the SNP 9.
Ireland elected Home Rulers in most of its seats from 1874; in December 1910 the Irish nationalist parties held 84 of Ireland's 103 seats. In 1918 Sinn Féin won 73 of 105, and its members did not take their seats. From 1922 only Northern Ireland sends members to Westminster.
Seats by party family in each nation
Ireland to 1918, Northern Ireland from 1922. Nations by the constituency's point; Monmouthshire counts as Wales.
"Red Wall" is a label, not a list. Here I use a simple, checkable version: seats in the North East, North West, Yorkshire and the Humber, the East and West Midlands, and Wales that Labour won in 2017 and the Conservatives won in 2019, on the same boundaries. That gives 45 seats. By name, the median one had returned Labour at 6 general elections in a row before 2019.
New boundaries came in for 2024, so seats cannot be compared one for one. The Commons Library publishes notional 2019 results on the new boundaries (estimates by Rallings and Thrasher and others for the broadcasters). Of the 160 new seats in the same regions that the Conservatives would have won in 2019, Labour won 106 in 2024 and the Conservatives kept 42. Across Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the Conservatives held 120 of their 372 notional 2019 seats.
Winners in 2024 of the seats the Conservatives would have won in 2019
Notional 2019 results on the 2024 boundaries, North, Midlands and Wales.
Turnout in contested seats peaked in January 1910, when the median constituency saw 87.8% of its electors vote, on a much smaller electorate of men only. Post-war turnout stayed above 70% until 2001. In 2024, 59.7% of registered electors cast a valid vote.
Median turnout in contested seats
Valid votes as a share of the electorate, as given in the source.
Results. Candidate-level results for every general election from 1832 to 2019 come from the UK Parliament and House of Commons Library dataset behind UK General Elections Results 1832 to 2019 (party labels, votes, turnout and an uncontested flag). 2024, and the notional 2019 results on the 2024 boundaries, come from the Commons Library's Election Results site. University seats and multi-member seats are included as in the source.
Winners and seats. The source does not say how many members each seat elected. I took that from Wikidata, which records each MP's seat and the election they won it at, and checked it against the totals: the seat counts add up to 658 in 1832, 670 in 1885 and 707 in 1918, as they should. Winners are the top candidates by votes, or all candidates where the return was unopposed. The winners' surnames agree with the members Wikidata lists for 98.7% of the 31,056 seats filled from 1832 to 2019.
Party families. Party labels change, merge and split, so the map groups them into families. The Liberal family runs from Whigs and Radicals to the Liberal Democrats; Liberal Unionists (1886 to 1910) and Peelites keep their own colours; Liberal Nationals and National Liberals (from 1931), National Labour and other National Government allies form a separate group, not the Liberal family. Irish Unionists, and Ulster Unionists up to 1970, sat with the Conservatives; from 1974 the Ulster unionist parties are their own group. Irish nationalists (Repeal, Home Rule, Irish Parliamentary, SDLP) are one family and Sinn Féin another. Every candidate keeps the party label the source gives, and it is shown when you tap a dot. Checked against the infoboxes of the English Wikipedia articles on each election, my Conservative, Liberal and Labour seat totals agree within two seats in 111 of 130 comparisons; the bigger gaps come from members that Wikipedia counts in another column (Repeal members elected with Whigs in 1835 and 1837, Peelites in 1847 and 1852, Lloyd George's National Liberals in 1922, the National Liberals of the 1950s).
Places, not boundaries. Historic boundaries are not available as open data for every era, so each constituency is a point: its own Wikidata coordinates for 1,269 of 2,326 constituencies, otherwise its town or county looked up in Wikidata or OS Open Names (a test on seats with known coordinates put 98% of looked-up points within 25 km of the right place), and a named stand-in town for 47 more. Seats named North, South, East or West are nudged that way. University seats have no area and sit at their university town. On the map the dots are spread apart, so cities swell and rural seats look smaller than they were.
Votes. Vote shares count every vote cast in contested seats. Before 1950 electors in two-member seats had two votes, so national shares for those years are shares of votes, not voters. Unopposed seats have no votes. "Your place through time" shows the nearest constituency point at each election, which is usually but not always the seat that covered that spot.
Limits. By-elections are not included, nor are changes of party between elections. Party labels for nineteenth-century candidates are those of the source and are sometimes disputed. Electorates are only in the 2024 file, so turnout before 2024 is the source's figure for each seat.