North Southwark and Bermondsey was a parliamentary constituency which returned one Member of Parliament (MP) to the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. The constituency was created for the 1997 general election. Minor boundary changes occurred for the 2010 general election; the constituency was renamed Bermondsey and Old Southwark. Boundaries The London Borough of Southwark wards of Abbey, Bricklayers, Browning, Burgess, Cathedral, Chaucer, Dockyard, Newington, Riverside, and Rotherhithe. As the name suggests, the seat incorporated large parts of the old Metropolitan Borough of Bermondsey and Metropolitan Borough of Southwark, within the modern London Borough of Southwark (which is much larger than historic Southwark). The seat was created in 1997 and was primarily the successor seat to the old Southwark & Bermondsey constituency which existed from 1983 until 1997. Before that the core of the seat was the Bermondsey constituency in which incarnation a notorious by-election took place in 1983. For the 2010 United Kingdom general election it was replaced by a renamed but barely altered Bermondsey and Old Southwark. History For the detailed history of the equivalent constituency prior to 1997, see Southwark and Bermondsey. Southwark North and Bermondsey was unusual for an Inner London constituency in that the area was represented by a Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament (MP) for over twenty-five years. Many commentators felt that this unusual state of affairs was entirely down to the circumstances of the 1983 Bermondsey by-election. Prior to this, the seat had a long history of representation by Labour MPs, but in the early 1980s the local Labour Party was dominated by the far left. The sitting MP Bob Mellish was directly opposed to their approach and accepted an invitation to sit on the board directing the regeneration of London Docklands. Bermondsey Constituency Labour Party selected its secretary Peter Tatchell. A magazine article he had written about direct action was used by a Social Democrat MP to embarrass Labour Party leader Michael Foot who impetuously denounced Tatchell and stated that he would not be endorsed, but the party was forced to accept him when Mellish resigned from the House of Commons, triggering a by-election widely regarded as one of the dirtiest in history. Tatchell came in for immense local and national vilification and in a shock result the Liberal candidate Simon Hughes established that his party had the best chance of the other candidates, and monopolised the anti-Tatchell