At a party event in a school hall in Lewisham, people told me how disillusionment with Labour has led to this moment. On a dreary Saturday morning, they stream in from all over London, hare along Kent's A-roads, pour off Suffolk and Surrey trains, to converge on this primary school. It's the largest venue the volunteers could hire and the corridors, the loos, even the little library with its impressive range of Julia Donaldsons, are all heaving with grownups.
We cram into the assembly hall, where the crowd is declared as the biggest turnout in Green history. The sole exception, I find later, is polling day of the last general election; yet today's draw is not some short, sharp fight for Westminster, but a campaign for the council, where ballots are months away. In normal times, this stuff is about as pedestrian as politics gets, drawing a handful or two of diehards to trudge door to door, begging old customers to put their X in the usual spot.
Yet the size of today's crowd tells you these aren't normal times. This winter is a hinge moment in British politics, the point at which the default choice of leftwing voters is no longer Labour. In Wales, it will be Plaid Cymru; in Scotland, the SNP. And in this corner of inner London, as in many English cities, it will be the Greens.
For this position, the party owes much to its opponents, among them Jeremy Corbyn, Zarah Sultana and their genius advisers for so swiftly turning Your Party into a sparsely attended wake. But its biggest bouquet must go to Keir Starmer's Labour. Look up 'one-party state' in a political dictionary and alongside Pyongyang there will feature Lewisham. At the last council elections in 2022, Labour scooped every single seat, plus the mayoralty. The local Green party, on the other hand, shrank so drastically it came close to shutting down.
Then: lift-off. Lewisham began 2025 with about 500 Green party members; by autumn, almost as many were signing up in just one week. At the start of 2026, the local party stands at about 2,500, putting it just behind the Green 'fortress' of Hackney. At the school's entrance I meet Ed, whose job it is to call up local newbies and welcome them to the party. Last January, the task was his alone. Today, he heads a team of nearly 25.
'Six months ago, I wouldn't have believed we could fight Lewisham,' says the Green party CEO, Harriet Lamb, sipping tea in the hall and looking around with undisguised astonishment. 'Now I look across Manchester, Birmingham, Newcastle and I think: this is a social movement.' While SW1 theorises that the Green surge is down to Polanski, SE4 reality says it's 99% Starmer.
