About
The Spring Arts & Heritage Centre occupies a distinctive Grade II listed former Havant Urban District Council offices building on East Street, bringing together a vibrant arts programme with the town's local heritage collections under one roof. The heritage galleries explore Havant's long history as a market town in the Hampshire coastal plain, from its Roman origins through its medieval wool trade to the industries that shaped the town's modern character. Havant was historically renowned for two highly specialist crafts: parchment-making, which took advantage of the exceptionally pure spring water rising at the town's heart, and the manufacture of gloves — a trade that supported hundreds of families in the town and surrounding villages throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The museum displays tools, equipment, and finished examples from both industries, alongside archive photographs that reveal how dramatically the town changed during the twentieth century.
The arts side of the centre hosts a rolling programme of contemporary visual art exhibitions, live performances, film screenings, and community workshops that bring new life to this compact but lively venue. Galleries rotate displays regularly, ensuring repeat visitors always encounter something fresh. The building sits close to Havant's ancient parish church of St Faith and within easy walking distance of the Langstone Harbour shore, making it a natural cultural focal point for a town that might otherwise be overshadowed by its larger neighbour Portsmouth. Local residents have contributed significantly to the heritage collections through donations of photographs, documents, and objects, giving the displays a genuinely community-rooted quality. For visitors arriving by rail, Havant station is just a few minutes' walk, and the centre makes an excellent complement to the nearby RNLI College and the birdwatching hides at the Langstone and Chichester Harbours.
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Plan Your Visit
⏱️ Recommended Visit Duration
💡 Visitor Tips
- Check the website before visiting — exhibition openings and artist talks are regularly programmed and add significantly to the experience.
- The heritage galleries are free and can be visited quickly or slowly; allow extra time if you want to read all the archive photograph captions, which are particularly rich in personal detail.
- Havant station is just a 4-minute walk, making this an easy stop on a day trip along the Portsmouth–Brighton coastal rail corridor.
- Combine with a walk to Langstone Harbour (15 minutes on foot) for excellent birdwatching — particularly waders and wildfowl in autumn and winter.
- The nearby St Faith's Church, parts of which date to the thirteenth century, is usually open and contains some fine medieval stonework.
- Parking in central Havant is pay-and-display; the Civic Centre Car Park on Civic Centre Road is the most convenient for the Spring.
- The arts programme is strongly community-rooted — checking local listings may reveal evening events, workshops, or film screenings worth planning around.
- If visiting with children, ask staff about any current family activities; community engagement with schools means family-friendly programming is often available.
Highlights
Parchment-Making Heritage Gallery
Havant's identity as a parchment-making town rested on the exceptional purity of its spring water, which emerged at precisely the right temperature for processing sheepskins. The gallery displays original scrapers, stretching frames, and lunellum knives used in the trade, alongside finished parchment specimens and archival documents written on locally-produced material.
Interpretive panels explain the complete production process from raw fleece to finished writing surface, illuminating an industry that kept Havant prominent in the national trade until the mid-twentieth century.
Glovemaking Collection
From the eighteenth century to the early twentieth, Havant and the surrounding villages of Emsworth, Rowlands Castle, and Bedhampton were deeply embedded in the Hampshire gloving industry. Skilled stitchers worked in cottage outworkers' networks supplying wholesalers in London and beyond. The collection includes hand-stitching frames, stretching tools, pattern templates, and a striking selection of finished gloves from different eras, illustrating how this delicate craft sustained rural and semi-urban families while the town's larger industries rose and fell around them.
Havant's Spring Waters Display
The town's very name derives from the Old English words for 'spring' and 'spring-fed farm', and the natural springs that rise in central Havant were the engine behind its industrial economy. This display explains the geology of the local chalk aquifer, the history of the spring itself, and how access to pure, constant-temperature water made industries from parchment to brewing possible in a modest market town.
Historic photographs and maps show how the spring and its channels shaped the town's street plan over many centuries.
Havant Market Town Archive Photography
A curated selection from the centre's rich archive of historical photographs traces Havant's transformation from a quiet Hampshire market settlement into a busy commuter and light-industrial town over the twentieth century. Images document the High Street in the Victorian era, wartime changes, the construction of the modern shopping centre, and the faces and events of community life.
Many photographs were donated by local families, and the displays include captions drawing on personal recollections contributed through community engagement projects.
Collections
The Spring Arts & Heritage Centre holds Havant Borough Council's local heritage collections, with particular strengths in the town's distinctive craft industries of parchment-making and glove manufacture. The collections include tools, finished products, trade records, and photographic archives documenting these industries alongside the broader social and economic history of Havant, Emsworth, Havant Waterloo, and the surrounding coastal plain communities.
Donated family photographs form a significant part of the archive, giving the collections an intimate, community-led character.
The arts collections rotate frequently, with a focus on contemporary work by living artists.
Havant: Town of Springs
The permanent heritage gallery covering the town's origins, industries, and social history from Roman times to the present day.
Current Exhibitions
No current exhibitions. Please check the museum website for updates.