Business events in Chandler's Ford

Three fords and a brickworks

Eastleigh Borough Council's heritage paper says Chandler's Ford started out much like the New Forest, a mix of woodland, heath and wet meadow, and grew around three fords on tracks that are now main roads: Winchester-Southampton Road, Hursley Road and Leigh Road. Nobody now knows who the "Chandler" was. Farms came in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; Hiltonbury Farm, probably the oldest, appears on a map of 1588 and was once part of an estate owned by Richard Cromwell, Oliver Cromwell's son. It stopped farming in the late 1970s and is now a pub.

The first big change came around 1870 with brickmaking. The main brickworks stood where the Brickfield Industrial Estate is today, and the council paper calls it the largest in the country. It supplied bricks for Chandler's Ford itself, for Eastleigh and the railway carriage works there, and three million bricks for the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand in London. Work there stopped around the First World War.

Built in stages

Most of the town is more recent. The council paper describes the Bournemouth Road shopping parade going up in the 1930s, the western side of Hursley Road and then Hiltingbury, Scantabout, Peverells Wood, Oakmount and the central precinct from the mid-1950s, the Fryern Arcade in the mid-1960s, and a further parade at Fryern Hill in the 1980s and 1990s. Before D-Day, it says, around 10,000 troops were camped in Chandler's Ford, mostly between Hiltingbury and Hocombe roads.

The result is a place the ONS counts as a built-up area of 31,975 people, larger than Alton or Romsey on the same measure, but laid out as neighbourhoods with local shopping parades rather than one high street. It became a parish in its own right in April 2010, with its own parish council.

Work and getting around

For business purposes Chandler's Ford sits inside Eastleigh borough, where the ONS counted 5,350 enterprises in 2026; that figure covers the whole borough, not just this town. The station closed in 1969 and reopened in 2003, and today South Western Railway manages it.

Meeting here

We have pages for two Chandler's Ford venues: The King Rufus and Masala Lounge. Eastleigh and Southampton are close by, and both belong to Southampton and the Solent with Chandler's Ford.