Locks Heath is immediately surrounded by a collection of villages including Sarisbury to the west, Swanwick, Park Gate and Whiteley to the north, Warsash to the southwest and Titchfield to the southeast.

The industry developed as a result of the 1866 Enclosure Acts which allowed the common land to be split into a large number of small plots.

[3][4] Swanwick railway station opened on 2 September 1889[5] and helped to facilitate the transportation of large quantities of strawberries to customers all over the country.

This was caused by a variety of factors, including the demand for development land, competition from abroad and the increasingly strict requirements of retailers for standardised products.

[8] Nikolaus Pevsner and David Wharton Lloyd wrote of Locks Heath in 1967 that "Pocket package suburbanization [is] now proceeding piecemeal; there is no need to try to describe the resultant mess".

The Lockswood Centre was built to provide additional facilities including the Lock Stock and Barrel pub (renamed the Strawberry Field Tavern in 2013) and a supermarket operated by Waitrose.