Security, Facilities & Fire Safety in Southampton & Portsmouth

Ashridge Group provides SIA-licensed manned guarding, facilities management and waking watch across Southampton, Portsmouth and the Solent. From our Buckinghamshire base we cover the region’s ports and marine logistics, cruise terminals, hospital and university estates, business parks and city-centre sites, with SIA-licensed, BS 7858-vetted officers and relief cover so there are never gaps.

The Solent is dominated by two of the UK’s major ports, Southampton and Portsmouth. The Port of Southampton is the UK’s number-one vehicle-handling port (around 600,000 vehicles a year), a major deep-sea trade hub handling roughly £40 billion of exports, and Europe’s leading turnaround cruise port with about 3 million passengers a year across five cruise terminals, supporting some 45,600 jobs and £2.5 billion in GVA. The port-linked distribution belt at Nursling Industrial Estate (including the new 135,617 sq ft Nursling 135 unit), Marchwood and the M271/M27 J3 corridor, plus Portsmouth’s commercial and ferry port, drive constant demand for 24/7 gatehouse and yard security, HGV-movement control, access control and out-of-hours patrols.

Cruise and passenger operations add their own requirements: passenger-flow management, access control and screening across the Ocean, Queen Elizabeth II, City, Mayflower and Horizon terminals. Healthcare is another major anchor: University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust employs more than 11,500 staff and serves over 1.9 million people. Together with Southampton Science Park and the University of Southampton, these clinical, campus and corporate sites need integrated manned guarding, front-of-house concierge and facilities support.

Ongoing industrial and logistics development at Nursling and Marchwood, plus continuing port and cruise-terminal investment, produce recurring construction-site and fit-out security demand, followed by operational guarding and FM. No Southampton- or Portsmouth-specific cladding count is published, but the region’s high-rise and complex residential blocks fall under the national Building Safety Fund and Cladding Safety Scheme. Where a building’s safety case requires temporary simultaneous-evacuation measures we provide compliant, NFCC- and Building Safety Act-aligned waking watch and fire patrols. We help transition to permanent alarm-led arrangements under the Waking Watch Replacement Fund.