The place

Located at the mouth of the river Hamble, Warsash was a small timber and fishing port and also a landing-place for the Hamble-Warsash ferry - an important link in an historic route between Portsmouth and Southampton. The area became notable in the nineteenth century for its strawberry growing.

At the crossroads in the centre of the village there is an unusual clocktower built in about 1900. This is an example of Warsash's Edwardian building and prosperity, when people came from miles around for crab and lobster and strawberry teas. Hook, located nearby, was of earlier importance, as a 'dockyard' in the Hundred Years War; it later became The Hook Estate of the Hornby family. More recently Warsash has grown to be one of the many suburbs in the Portsmouth to Southampton corridor.

The band

There has been a village band in Warsash since 1918. Although that original band only played together for about five years there has been a more or less continuous history of music making in Warsash village since that early beginning.

The present band can trace its history back to the early 1980s when it was founded by three local families, the Smiths, Gorhams and Webbers, to give their children an opportunity to make music together.

Originally this was a brass band, as reflected in it's original title, the Warsash Brass Band. However, things have changed a bit since that time. The original children have grown up and moved on. New recruits joined and brought with them woodwind instruments, reflected in the new name of "The Warsash Band."

The band's instrumentation is now like that of a British Military Band and consists of trumpets, horns, trombones, euphoniums and tubas in the brass section and saxophones, clarinets, flutes and oboe in the woodwind section. A drummer completes the ensemble. The repertoire is also like that of a Military Band.