The Southampton constituencies are named after the two rivers flowing through the City, and Itchen is the city’s eastern side. It contains the town centre, most of the docks, marina, and inner-city council estates. The port has been important since roman times, though it now has less to do with the military in its role as a ferry terminal and merchant navy base. The parts of the docks that became redundant in the last couple of decades have been undergoing re-development and are now put to retail and business uses.
The constituency includes the impoverished Thornhill area in the east of the city. On the basis of a whole range of measures of social exclusion, it was recently given the go-ahead to bid for up to £50m of government money under the New Deal for communities programme.
Itchen was one of the narrowest Labour gains in 1992 and was then one of the party’s few southern seats.