It is west of the diminutive City of London, fixed with four MPs in 1298, and the north part of Lambeth, created a broad constituency in 1832.

By official definition the areas retained were "the Westminster district and Close of the Collegiate Church of St Peter"; a seat named Strand was created in the north-east and a seat, St George's, Hanover Square, in the west.

The Westminster constituency represented the centre of British government and had a large electorate so that it was independent of the control of a patron.

Before the Reform Act 1832 the right to vote was held by the male inhabitants paying scot and lot (a kind of local property tax).

In the sixteenth century the Church officials associated with Westminster Abbey had a large influence in the area, but as the community became bigger that became less important.

The Court (or His Majesty's Treasury) had some legitimate influence (by the standards of the age), because of the royal residences and government offices in the borough.

The use of public funds to bribe the electorate was not unknown, during close elections (see the comments about the cost of the 1780 and 1784 contests below).

Local landowners who were prepared to stir up ill-will by threatening to evict or raise the rents of tenants voting the wrong way, could also affect the result.

The Treasury spent the enormous sums of more than £8,000 in 1780 and £9,000 in 1784, in unsuccessful attempts to defeat the opposition Whig leader Charles James Fox.

So expensive were these contests that for the next general election in 1790, the government and opposition leaders reached a formal agreement for each to have one member returned unopposed.

However, in the event a second Whig candidate did appear, but the Tory (the famous Admiral Lord Hood) and Fox were re-elected without too much difficulty.

The last MP for this constituency, William Burdett-Coutts, was connected with a family prominent in City of Westminster politics since the eighteenth century.

Westminster was the constituency of fraudulent businessman Augustus Melmotte, who gained election as a Conservative, in Anthony Trollope's satirical novel, The Way We Live Now (published 1875).