Stratford-on-Avon.

Stratford-on-Avon is a rural West Midlands seat anchored on a single sizeable town and a wide scatter of smaller places. Stratford-upon-Avon itself holds about 27,000 people, under a third of the constituency; beyond it the population thins into dispersed countryside and a string of market towns -- Bidford-on-Avon, Studley, Alcester and Shipston-on-Stour, none above 7,000. The character is older and more comfortable than the national norm, with a median age of 49 and around two in five residents degree-educated. One authority runs local services across all 31 wards: Stratford-on-Avon District Council, a district authority.

That council has tilted towards the Liberal Democrats in recent contests. Across the 31 most-recent ward results the party leads on 19 wards to the Conservatives' eight, with the Greens holding three and Reform UK one, a pattern that broadly mirrors the parliamentary picture. The seat changed hands at the 2024 general election, when the Liberal Democrats took 44.3 per cent and the Conservatives, who had won three-fifths of the vote in 2019, fell to 30.8 per cent as runner-up. Manuela Perteghella has held the seat for the party since that contest. The swing was large, though several rural wards still return Conservative or Green members.

On the figures available the seat looks more contested than its long Conservative history would suggest, with the Liberal Democrats now ahead at both ward and Westminster level but no single party dominant across the countryside. Recent local coverage has had a markedly administrative tenor, weighted towards council leadership changes and the slow business of the area's local plan and the prospect of local government reorganisation rather than any sharp controversy. The direction of travel appears to favour the incumbents for now, but a divided rural map and a recent realignment leave the seat better read as in flux than settled.