Where It All Goes Down
Mostly England
Starting out in a nursery in an unidentified area of England, The Waves takes its characters (and, by extension, us) all over the U.K. during the course of the story. However, Woolf often uses pretty non-specific language to lay out the environments that the characters move through—which makes sense, given that the novel generally regards actions and settings outside of the mind as secondary to the characters' internal journeys and mental landscapes.
Despite the novel's general tendency to avoid details about landmarks or even town names, here are the details we do get: after nursery school, the narrators go to boarding schools in different regions of England. Then, Susan goes off to Switzerland to finish her education, while Bernard and Neville attend universities in Edinburgh and London, respectively.
It appears that Louis and Jinny don't go to college and end up in London. After university, it isn't immediately clear where Bernard settles, but late in the book he mentions being on a return trip to Waterloo after meeting up with his friends. Not Napoleon's Waterloo. The boring one in England.
It seems that Neville, Jinny, Rhoda, and Louis all live in London, with only Susan opting for an adulthood in the country. She lives in Lincolnshire, as we learn only through a passing reference late in the novel, which is super-pretty.
Although Rhoda and Bernard both take joyrides to other parts of Europe, the novel stays England-centric. What's the point of this? Well, like we mentioned above, the real landscape of The Waves is internal: the rocky moonscapes of the characters' minds. Woolf, as an Englishwoman writing for an English audience, probably wanted to highlight the fact that this novel was about Google-mapping the soul, man, and so she set it in the most mundane place she could think of: merry old England.