;Since 1997: The constituency was created for the
1997 general election by the merger of the former
Greenwich constituency, and the western half of the former
Woolwich constituency. It has been controlled by the
Labour Party since its creation, when they polled 63.4% of the vote and a majority of 44.8%. Thirteen years later, the
2010 general election produced the smallest majority as a share of the vote, 24.7%, with the Labour candidate taking 49.2% of votes cast. The 2015 general election result was the 105th-safest Labour majority of 232 seats won by Labour at that election. ;Greenwich forerunner Reflecting a demographic split in the latter twentieth century were five and eleven-year periods when the two predecessor seats were represented by candidates from the
SDP. The former Greenwich constituency was a secure Labour Party seat for much of the twentieth century, though it had been a safe
Liberal seat throughout most of the nineteenth century. In
1987, it was gained by the
Social Democratic Party at a by-election and narrowly regained by Labour five years later at the
1992 general election. ;Woolwich forerunner The former Woolwich constituency (and its predecessor
Woolwich East) was a similar safe-Liberal-seat-turned-safe-Labour-seat. Its Labour MP
Christopher Mayhew defected to the Liberal Party in 1974 before being defeated, and his Labour successor,
John Cartwright, defected to the SDP in 1981. He retained the seat at the 1983 and 1987 general elections, but narrowly lost it to Labour in 1992; in a similar fashion to the neighboring Greenwich seat. In council elections, since the seat's 1997 creation, most wards have tended to elect Labour councillors and few wards other than the Blackheath Westcombe ward have tended to elect Conservative councilors. ;1945-1997 combined summary Including the pre-1997 predecessors, the area has since
World War II been a
Labour safe seat, or, as indicated in the 1987 result for Greenwich only, in the best result for a
Conservative candidate locally during the years since
1955, occasionally a
marginal. ==Boundaries==