How does Campr choose which campsites to list?

Machine-gathered, human-judged. We pull data from open mapping, place signals and our own recrawls, run every site through vision review, and then a human makes the final call. No site can pay its way into the guide.

Is Campr independent?

Yes. Whether a site appears in the guide (and what we write about it) is always an editorial decision. Services we offer owners never change either.

No. Campr has been chasing good campsites since 2009, first as a camping blog, then as an award-nominated app whose team visited 84 UK sites in person, and now as this guide. Today's catalogue holds 592 hand-picked sites.

Does Campr take bookings?

No. Every listing links you straight to the owner's own booking system, so your camping money goes to the people who run the field.

I run a campsite. How do I get listed?

Tell us about your site via the owners page. Submission isn't admission: every submitted site goes through the same review as the rest of the catalogue. The founder grew up on a campsite, so we know what it's like on your side of the gate.

About Campr: 17 years of chasing good campsites

Campr is a hand-picked guide to camping in the UK: 592 sites chosen on character, honestly described, with no booking fees. The story of how it got here spans seventeen years, three forms and one family campsite.

The story How we curate Fair questions

The beginning · West End Farm

I grew up on a campsite. My parents run West End Farm, fifteen acres of caravans and tents just outside Weston-super-Mare, and I spent my childhood watching families arrive on a Friday stressed from the drive and leave on Sunday as different people. I've been trying to bottle that feeling ever since.

2009 · The blog

Campr started in 2009 as a camping blog, named in the Flickr-era tradition of dropping a vowel and hoping for the best. It did surprisingly well. Most camping websites at the time were grim directories full of clip art, so a site that cared what campsites actually looked like stood out, and before long it was even paying its way with a few hundred pounds a month in affiliate links. The trouble was I didn't want to spend my evenings recommending places I'd never stood in. If Campr was going to be any good, I needed to go and see them.

2014–2016 · The road years

So we went. Along with Eifion Jones, co-founder, on content and film, and Martin Jones on music and sound, I spent two summers driving around England and Wales visiting 84 campsites, and we filmed, photographed and reviewed every single one. All of that became the Campr app for iOS and Android, a camping guidebook rebuilt for the phone in your pocket, with nothing in it we hadn't seen for ourselves.

For a while it flew. Creative England gave us seed funding through their Starter for 10 programme, Apple featured the app regularly and 60,000 people downloaded it. Tap! magazine made us their lead story, the Observer and the Independent both wrote about us, and the Sparkies shortlisted us for best app. Every photo and every frame of film was ours.

Eifion and Martin with camera kit at the gate of Newgale Camp Site in Pembrokeshire, golden hour — The crew at Newgale, Pembrokeshire

Two of the crew filming from the raised bucket of a farm digger — An improvised camera platform

A campsite owner serving tea and homemade cake at a picnic table — Tea and cake with a site owner

Recording location sound with a shotgun mic beside a stone wall — Recording real sound for the films

On the road, 2014 to 2016. Eifion's films still play on some listings today.

Campr Selected Sites: the showreel from the 2014 app, shot and scored by the crew above.

2016 · The honest bit

And then it ended, as bootstrapped things usually do, because the money ran out. We'd moved from a paid app to advertising to try and grow the audience, and the advertising never came close to covering the petrol. I went off to run design teams, first at Beano Studios and later the V&A, and Campr quietly wound down. The itch never went anywhere though.

2026 · The long way home

This summer I'm moving from East London back to Somerset, a few miles from the farm, and I'm bringing Campr with me. Two things have changed since the road years. Campsite discovery got worse, because the booking engines won and whoever pays the most now ranks highest. And the tools got much, much better. What took three of us and seed funding in 2014, one stubborn person with serious AI behind him can now do properly. The machines do the gathering, I make the calls, and the 592 sites in the guide today were chosen exactly the way the 84 were.

Campr has been a blog, then an app, and now a guide. The form keeps changing but the point of it hasn't budged since West End Farm: knowing the difference between a field and a good field.

James Nation

Founder & curator · Somerset (nearly) · info@campr.co.uk

The day job is product design: twenty years of it, running design at Beano Studios, leading product at the V&A, and now consulting independently. Campr is where all of that meets a childhood on a campsite. If you need a product designer, that lives at jamesnation.co.uk.

How we curate

Machine-gathered, human-judged.

In 2014 we drove to every site. In 2026 the machines do the driving: open mapping, place signals and our own deep recrawls, run through vision review to verify what a site actually looks like. Owners can claim and enrich their listing, but the final say on what earns a place in Campr is still a human with strong opinions about fields. See the catalogue in numbers.

Our sources

Open mappingosm
Place signalsgoogle_places
Deep recrawldeep_recrawl
Vision reviewvision_qa
Owner claimowner_claim

Fair questions

How does Campr choose which campsites to list?: Machine-gathered, human-judged. We pull data from open mapping, place signals and our own recrawls, run every site through vision review, and then a human makes the final call. No site can pay its way into the guide.
Is Campr independent?: Yes. Whether a site appears in the guide (and what we write about it) is always an editorial decision. Services we offer owners never change either.
Is Campr new?: No. Campr has been chasing good campsites since 2009, first as a camping blog, then as an award-nominated app whose team visited 84 UK sites in person, and now as this guide. Today's catalogue holds 592 hand-picked sites.
Does Campr take bookings?: No. Every listing links you straight to the owner's own booking system, so your camping money goes to the people who run the field.
I run a campsite. How do I get listed?: Tell us about your site via the owners page. Submission isn't admission: every submitted site goes through the same review as the rest of the catalogue. The founder grew up on a campsite, so we know what it's like on your side of the gate.

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The long way home.