Rotten Boroughs: Where Are They Now? England's Disfranchised Boroughs of 1832 and Their Places Today

Before the Reform Act of 1832, boroughs such as Old Sarum, Gatton and Dunwich returned two Members of Parliament each from a handful of voters, while Manchester and Birmingham returned none. I map every borough named in the Act's schedules (56 disfranchised, 30 reduced to one member, 43 newly enfranchised), place each with OS Open Names, collect its 1831 electorate and population from the constituency articles on Wikipedia, and follow the places to Census 2021 and the ONS income estimates for the financial year ending 2023. The seat counts reproduce the Act's totals (143 borough seats removed, 65 created). For the 34 disfranchised boroughs with a known electorate, the median was 39 voters; 12 of England's 30 largest towns of 1801 had no member of their own until 1832. Cornwall held 13 of the 56 disfranchised boroughs. Today 27 of the 56 are towns in the Ordnance Survey's gazetteer, 23 are villages, one is a hamlet, 4 are parts of larger towns and Old Sarum is an empty hill. Where both figures exist, the median borough has grown 4.6 times since 1831, and 7 have fewer people. In household income the disfranchised boroughs are level with the area 5 to 25 km around them (median difference 0.0%), while the new boroughs of 1832 are below theirs (median -4.8%). The rotten boroughs did not vanish: most became ordinary small towns and villages of southern England. Interactive version: https://tristan-hotham.github.io/rotten-boroughs/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/rotten-boroughs. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/27/rotten-boroughs/.