Business events in Fareham

Fifty years as a borough

Fareham Borough Council held its first meeting on 9 April 1974, when the captain of HMS Collingwood presented the new borough with the civic mace it still uses. The timeline it published for its fiftieth year is a quick way to understand the town. The Civic Offices were finished in 1975, the leisure centre opened in 1980 and Fareham Shopping Centre was completed in 1981. Solent Business Park opened in 1988, Westbury Manor Museum in 1990 and a new bus station in 1993.

The ONS counts 42,625 people in the Fareham built-up area (2021 Census). The borough takes in more than the town: Portchester, Titchfield and Whiteley all appear in the council's own list of milestones.

A council that owns a lot

What stands out in Fareham is how much the borough council owns and runs directly. It bought the former HMS Daedalus airfield from the Homes and Communities Agency in 2015, three years after the Solent Enterprise Zone was established there in 2012. The Fareham Innovation Centre opened at Daedalus in 2015, and the Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Park followed in 2022.

In 2023 the council also bought Fareham Shopping Centre, so the town's shopping centre is in public hands. One of the venues we list, Save a Warrior Co-Working Space, is inside it.

Welborne is the borough's planned new community. The Welborne Plan was adopted into the Local Plan in 2015, and the government gave it Garden Community status in 2017.

Across the borough, the ONS counted 4,380 enterprises in its 2026 UK Business Counts. Of those, 3,835 had fewer than ten staff and 20 had 250 or more, so the business community here is mostly small firms, with a few large employers.

Getting here and meeting here

Fareham station is managed by South Western Railway. By bus, the Eclipse rapid transit route runs between Fareham and Gosport, partly on an old railway line, as Gosport's local plan describes.

We have pages for the Civic Offices, Portchester Sailing Club, Solent Hotel and Spa and The Parsons Collar. For neighbouring towns, see Gosport, Lee-on-the-Solent and Portsmouth, or the Portsmouth and the south coast page.