Business events in Portsmouth and the south coast

Four councils round one harbour

This part of the county is mostly town, end to end. Portsmouth sits on Portsea Island, and the Office for National Statistics counts it as the most densely populated of the South East's 64 council areas, with 208,100 people at the 2021 Census. Around it are three boroughs with their own councils: Havant (124,200 people), Fareham (114,500) and Gosport (81,900). Those are council-area figures, so they take in the villages and suburbs as well as the town centres. Even outside the city the coast is closely built: the ONS ranks Gosport the eighth most densely populated council area in the South East, Havant fifteenth and Fareham nineteenth. Gosport is also the only one of the four whose population fell between the two censuses, by 0.9%.

The towns run into each other along the A27 and the shore. Southsea is the seafront end of Portsmouth; Drayton and Waterlooville sit on the mainland to the north; Havant, Emsworth and Rowlands Castle lead east towards the Sussex border; Fareham, Gosport and Lee-on-the-Solent lie to the west. At the far eastern end, Emsworth looks out over Chichester Harbour, and West Sussex starts on the other side of the little River Ems.

Work on and by the water

Much of what you see from the shore is the navy and the ferries. The naval base and the city council's ferry and cruise port share Portsmouth's harbour shore, and the Portsmouth page has the figures for both.

West of Gosport, the old Daedalus airfield at Lee-on-the-Solent is now Solent Airport and part of the Solent Enterprise Zone. Fareham Borough Council bought 369 acres there in 2015, has had an operator running the airport since 2016, and plans an aviation cluster of hangars for general and commercial aviation beside Faraday Business Park, whose first 9.2 hectares it released in 2015.

Moving around

The harbour shapes every journey here. By road, Gosport is a long way round to Portsmouth; on foot it is a four-minute ferry, which runs every 15 minutes from early morning until midnight and lands beside Portsmouth Harbour station. Inland, the A27 and the M27 tie Fareham, Portsmouth and Havant together, and the main line along the coast stops at each of them. Check which side of the water an event is on before you set off, and look at the venue's page for where to park.