'You've got to stick to your beliefs': Guildford's picturesque streets mask political discontent

"You gotta stick to your beliefs," asserts Alex Birt, a 23-year-old landlord from Guildford, a town where picture-perfect cobblestones pave the way to sky-high house prices. As the general election looms, SurreyLive headed to the town to understand what issues are on people's minds ahead of polling day.

Guildford’s picture-perfect cobblestones attract buyers willing to pay £200,000 more than the national average for a house. But Guildfordians pointed to a wide range of issues, not just housing, including: the NHS, the Environment, security, judicial independence, Gaza, and the cost-of-living crisis.

Alex Birt, 23, said prices were “absolutely unaffordable, especially for first-time buyers and people trying to save up for a mortgage or even to put down a deposit on a house.”

The landlord, who asserted Labour were likely to win the election, warned: “I'm a landlord in Hindhead, and I like to think I charge a fair price (£500 for one tenant, £650 for another). But generally, the prices around Hindhead are absolutely unaffordable. They really need to help first time buyers more but also introduce more rules for landlords. Make them less controlling and less authoritarian to their tenants.”

According to figures from the Office for National Statistics, ONS, the provisional average house price in Guildford in March 2024 was £487,000, compared to a national average of £286,000.

Read more: Surrey General Election predictions shows expected result in every constituency if vote was today

Nina Clayton, 34, pointed to the Environment as the defining issue this election. The owner of Solar Sisters, an zero-waste café at the top of Guildford’s town centre, said: “Any sort of policies that address the environmental crisis are really important to me.”

'Funding the NHS' and 'public services' were most important to James Varney, 28. And Jimi Walters, 34, Surrey (pictured bottom right) wanted more funding for arts and culture.

Meanwhile, people in the town were united in their general apathy towards the two leading candidates for Prime Minister: Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer. Those sympathetic to Sunak called him ‘hard-working,’ but others dubbed him ‘out of touch’ and ‘out of his depth.’

James Varney said the Prime Minister, whilst being ‘safe,’ was full of ‘broken promises.' The same was the case with Starmer, who Nina termed ‘uninspiring,’ but ‘needed as an alternative.'

Alex, a landlord, who labelled himself a Conservative, stated Starmer was leading the TV debates, but noted he was ‘angry’ with the Labour leader for his alleged purge of the party’s left-wing.

The 23 year-old said: “I don't believe that labour should stray away from their original values of socialism … This is coming from a person technically opposed to socialism, but that's just my opinion. You gotta stick to your beliefs.”

Guildford is part of the new Guildford constituency redrawn from the previous seat of the same name by Parliament’s boundary commission, which gave the areas southwest and southeast of the town to Godalming and Ash, and Dorking and Horley.

Although the Conservatives were historically dominant, the Liberal Democrats scythed through its 2015 majority of nearly eight thousand votes to reduce it to just over three thousand in 2019.

According to previous reporting by Surrey Live, a YouGov poll forecast a Lib Dem win in Guildford with a projected vote share of over 50 percent.

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