Little Camden

Last Updated on February 18, 2023

LittleCamden.co.uk was a site I built in 2006 after opening a shop called Know Your Product with a friend called Rikki Flag in Ipswich. We quickly made friends with some of the alternative shops around us and someone came up with the idea that as we technically weren’t competitiors we should really help each other out. Who actually came up with the idea of calling this area of Ipswich ‘Little Camden’ is up for debate, and quite frankly I don’t care! I built the site to perform well when people searched Google for the term ‘shopping ipswich’ – the idea being that it would draw attention to our little group of shops that were just outside the main shopping district in Ipswich. The site worked very well, but sadly not well enough to keep most of the shops open. We closed Know Your Product nearly a year ago (as I write this), and after continuing to run LittleCamden.co.uk for a few months I started to struggle to find the enthusiasm.

Where are they now?

• Staunch Extreme moved to the other side of town.
• Know Your Product closed down.
• Cat Black closed down.
• Ipswich Record and Tape Exchange closed down.
• The Spread Eagle did close down, but is now open again.

So with so many of the core alternative shops going out of business I decided the dream was over and shut down the LittleCamden.co.uk site. This blog post serves as a sort of archive of the photos I took for the site, as well as a last resting place for the map that showed where each shop was location.