Business events in Waterlooville

From forest to coaching stop

Until 1810 the land here was Crown forest. Havant Borough Council's short history of the name picks the story up after the Forest of Bere was enclosed: a Portsea brewer, Charles Matthews, bought a plot on the Portsmouth to Petersfield turnpike and built a coaching inn there in 1815.

The council is careful to call what follows a legend. Soldiers back from the Battle of Waterloo are said to have stopped at the inn, and it took their name: an auction document of 1816 already calls it the Heroes of Waterloo Inn. A settlement grew round it, a baptism record of 1832 calls the place Waterloo, and "ville" was added when the civil parish was created in 1858, to tell it apart from Waterloo in London. The inn was rebuilt in 1890 and again in 1966, and the name The Heroes is still in use.

So Waterlooville is a young town by Hampshire standards, and a large one. The ONS counted 34,775 people in the Waterlooville built-up area at the 2021 Census, which makes it a medium sized town in the ONS's own size bands.

The town centre and what is planned

The centre's future has had a lot of attention. Havant Borough Council adopted the Waterlooville Town Centre Masterplan as a supplementary planning document at Full Council on 17 December 2025. The council describes it as a framework for future development, investment and improvements to the public realm in the town centre, and as an adopted document it now carries weight in planning decisions.

Waterlooville has no borough of its own: it shares Havant Borough Council with Havant, Emsworth and Hayling Island. Business figures are kept at that level. The ONS business register counted 4,440 enterprises across Havant borough in 2026, and the council points to advanced manufacturing and engineering as the borough's strength. Those are borough figures, not a count for Waterlooville alone.

Meeting here

There is no railway station in Waterlooville itself; Havant, the other main town in the borough, has a main line station. By road, the council describes the borough as sitting where the A3(M) meets the A27.

Events listed here have met at Waterlooville Golf Club, on Cherry Tree Avenue in Cowplain, and at Number 73 Bar and Kitchen on London Road. For more nearby, see Drayton, Clanfield and the rest of Portsmouth and the south coast. If a weekly group is new to you, How a networking chapter works explains the shape of a meeting.