Southampton Itchen

Southampton, Itchen is a constituency represented in the House of Commons of the UK Parliament since 1992 by John Denham, a member of the Labour Party.HistoryThe constituency was created in 1950, when the previous two-member Southampton constituency was abolished.The constituency is named after the River Itchen, which flows through it and is the lesser of the two major rivers that reach the tidal estuary of Southampton Water at the city. Although until the 1970s it was a safe Labour seat, it elected a Conservative MP, Christopher Chope in 1983 and 1987 after the sitting MP Bob Mitchell left Labour in 1981 for the SDP. The combination of Mitchell as a strong SDP-Liberal Alliance candidate in both 1983 and 1987, together with Conservative landslides, made Southampton Itchen highly competitive.