2018–present: The City of Birmingham wards of Bartley Green, Edgbaston, Harborne, and Quinton, part of North Edgbaston and fragments of Weoley & Selly Oak and Balsall Heath West. 1997–2018: The City of Birmingham wards of Bartley Green, Edgbaston, Harborne, and Quinton. 1983–1997: The City of Birmingham wards of Edgbaston, Harborne, and Quinton. 1974–1983: The County Borough of Birmingham wards of Deritend, Edgbaston, Harborne, and Quinton. 1918–1974: The County Borough of Birmingham wards of Edgbaston, Harborne, and Market Hall. 1885–1918: The Municipal Borough of Birmingham ward of Edgbaston, part of Rotton Park ward, the local government district of Harborne, and part of the local government district of Balsall Heath. South west of Birmingham city centre, this is a house and garden-rich and mostly middle-income constituency with limited social housing, featuring parks, Warwickshire's cricket ground and two grammar schools. It was a safe Conservative seat for decades, emphasised by solid Tory areas like Edgbaston itself and Bartley Green, but some areas, such as the more Labour-inclined Quinton and Harborne, have pockets of considerable deprivation and of low incomes, helping Labour hold the seat since 1997. It contains the University of Birmingham's main campus, and most of the student halls.
History
The political division elected Conservative candidates as its MP between a by-election in 1898 and the 1992 general elections inclusive. The election of Gisela Stuart in 1997 produced a 10% majority fractionally exceeded in percentage terms by her re-election in 2001 on a lower turnout, stretching her majority to 12.1%. The 2015 re-election of Stuart gave the seat the thirtieth-smallest majority of Labour's 232 seats by percentage of majority and represented an improvement on 2010. On election night in May 1997, Birmingham Edgbaston was the ninth constituency to declare its results and the first seat to be gained by the Labour Party from the Conservatives on a 10% swing, after 99 years of Conservative control; presaging the Labour landslide victory of that night. Birmingham Edgbaston has returned only female MPs since 1953, longer than any other constituency in the UK. The current MP for the constituency is Preet Gill of the Labour Party, who is the first-ever female Sikh MP in the UK. She was first elected at the 2017 general election, after long-serving Labour MP Gisela Stuart stood down. It has been classified as a marginal seat. Turnout has ranged from 78.8% in 1950 to 48% in 1918, and was recorded as 61.5% in 2019.
