The Camping Survey 2014
At ProCamping we love a good piece of research, and the team at Go Outdoors put together the 2014 Camping Survey, presenting findings from 2,831 British campers. How much do you fit the norm, or what do you do differently?
Some of the key findings
48% of those surveyed had been camping for over 20 years, and 20% for less than 5 years — quite a mix of veteran campers and new. The most popular age group for camping was 30–49, covering more than 68% of those surveyed.
The most popular place for camping was shared between Pooley Bridge and Keswick, both in the Lake District. In the ProCamping tent we were discussing our own favourites — it's a struggle to pick just one, but probably camping on top of the rugged Pembrokeshire coastline.
It's not just about traditional camping either — there's a whole host of camping styles people were trying at the time, including wild camping, glamping, yurts, VW campers, snowholing and teepees.
Of course it's the camping stories that we love the most — that's what makes camping so fun, you always have a story or experience to share.
What the numbers suggest
Looking back at this data now, a few things stand out. The split between long-time campers and relative newcomers is a reminder that camping has never really been one single hobby — it's a mix of families who grew up doing it every summer and people picking it up fresh, often for very different reasons (cost, a taste for the outdoors, or just fancying a change from a package holiday). The dominance of the 30–49 age bracket lines up with what you'd expect: that's the stage of life where people have young families, some disposable income, and a car big enough to fill with kit, but haven't yet drifted towards more comfortable holidays.
The Lake District's showing as the top destination isn't surprising either — Cumbria has been a heartland of British camping and hillwalking for decades, with an unmatched concentration of campsites, fells and long-distance paths within a small area. What's more interesting is the range of alternative styles already appearing in a 2014 survey — glamping, yurts, VW campers — which shows that the "glamping boom" people talk about as a more recent trend was already well under way a decade ago, not something that appeared overnight.
How this compares to camping today
We won't pretend to have fresh survey data to compare this against — this page is a piece of 2014 research, not a live tracker of British camping habits. But it's fair to say, without inventing statistics, that the broader trend since has been toward more people camping and glamping in the UK, driven by staycation-friendly years, the growth of independent and boutique campsites, and more variety in how people camp (from ultralight backpacking to fully-equipped bell tents). The core appeal this survey captured — that camping is sociable, affordable relative to many other holidays, and generates the kind of stories people want to tell — hasn't changed at all, even if the specific numbers above are now over a decade old.
If anything, the diversity of camping styles this survey picked up on in 2014 has only grown since, with campsites now routinely offering a mix of pitches, pods, yurts and static options side by side rather than one or the other.