Business events in East Hampshire

Half town, half national park

East Hampshire is shaped by the South Downs. The district council's place-making strategy says 57% of it lies inside the South Downs National Park, including Petersfield, which means planning across more than half the district is decided by the national park authority rather than the council. The park itself, its authority says, covers more than 1,600 square kilometres from Winchester to Eastbourne.

The rest of the district is a string of market towns and villages. The Office for National Statistics counted 125,700 people at the 2021 Census, up 8.7% in ten years, and ranks the district the 12th least densely populated of the South East's 64 council areas. The council's strategy explains that the old market towns grew where the roads between London and Portsmouth, and between Chichester and Winchester, crossed, and those routes still shape how people get about.

The towns

Alton is the market town in the north of the district, on the A31 and at the end of the railway from London through Aldershot and Farnham. Liphook is in the east, by the A3 and the Surrey border, with a station on the line to Portsmouth. Clanfield is in the far south, on the edge of the downs above Waterlooville and the Portsmouth area.

Bordon is the one that is changing fastest. For more than a hundred years Whitehill and Bordon was a garrison town; the council records that the army left in December 2015 and moved to Lyneham in Wiltshire, freeing over 100 hectares of land. The plan is to turn the former garrison into a green, healthy and connected town by 2036, and the council calls it one of the country's most ambitious regeneration programmes.

Petersfield, the district's other main town, sits inside the national park; it gets a page here whenever events there are listed.

Getting about

The A3 and the A31 carry most of the traffic, and there is no single railway line that joins the towns: Alton is on one line, Liphook and Petersfield on another, and Bordon and Clanfield have no station. For an event here, the venue's own page is the best guide to the way in and the parking.