Guildford.

Guildford is a city-anchored seat in the South East, dominated by the cathedral city itself, which holds about three-quarters of the constituency's roughly 102,000 residents. Beyond the city, the seat thins into a band of commuter villages and small towns -- East Horsley, Send, Great Bookham and Fetcham, Ripley -- set among Surrey greenbelt, with a sizeable dispersed rural population. The character is prosperous and well-educated: a median age of 37, near half of adults degree-holders, and a population that is overwhelmingly White British. One authority, Guildford Borough Council, a district council, runs local services across the seat's seventeen wards.

The ward picture has tilted firmly towards the Liberal Democrats, who have taken twenty of the thirty-eight most recent contests, with the localist Residents for Guildford and Villages a clear second on seven and the Conservatives reduced to five. That direction-of-travel maps onto the parliamentary result. The seat changed hands at the 2024 general election, when the Liberal Democrats won on 47.5 per cent and pushed the Conservatives, who had held it in 2019, down to 30 per cent runner-up. Zöe Franklin took the seat for the Liberal Democrats that July, with no whipped dissent on record, and has spoken most on local government, social care and the economy.

On the figures available, the Conservative retreat here appears settled rather than marginal, and recent local coverage has carried a constructive, administrative tone -- much of it about the council's recovery and a wider reshaping of Surrey local government. Among recorded offences, public order and shoplifting both appear to run well above the comparable constituency average. The seat reads, for now, as one moving steadily in the Liberal Democrats' direction.