Hampshire Hampshire Hampshire (, ; abbreviated Hants) is a county on the southern coast of England. The county town of Hampshire is Winchester, the former capital of England. After the metropolitan counties and Greater London, Hampshire is the most populous ceremonial county (1.84 million in 2017) in the United Kingdom. Its two largest settlements, Southampton and Portsmouth, are administered separately as unitary authorities and the rest of the area forms the administrative county, which is governed by Hampshire County Council. First settled about 14,000 years ago, Hampshire's recorded history dates back to Roman times, when its capital was Winchester. When the
New England town the Massachusetts Constitution requires a town to have a population of at least 10,000 people before it can switch its government from a town meeting form to a city form. Nevertheless, even without a hard and fast population limit for city status, the practical threshold to become a city seems to be higher in the three southern New England states than in the three northern New England states. In Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island, almost every city has at least 10,000 people, and all but a few have at least 20,000. In Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, however, there are