01
Ask
Ask like you’d text a mate. ‘Date night in Lincoln.’ ‘Best coffee near the uni.’ The pocket guide reads it the way a friend would.
Find the good stuff around the corner.
A search engine that only knows locally owned places. Ask for anything, in your town or one you’re just visiting, and every answer puts your money in the hands of the people who run the place, not a boardroom. No chains, no franchises, nothing pretending to be local. It’s a small choice. Made together, it rebuilds high streets.
New round here? Start with this.
Recommend me somewhere to eat
Tell us where you are, who’s with you and any dietary needs. All optional, all skippable.
How it works
Three steps. Zero chains.
02
Locally owned only
Chains, franchises and private-equity brands are filtered out before ranking even starts. We verify who actually owns each place, city by city, and label every result by what we’ve confirmed so far.
03
Log what you loved
Rate the visit, log the dish you’d order again. Goodreads for your high street. Every log sharpens your next answer.
Plan a trip
Build a local trip around the part of town you actually want.
Pick a city, optionally narrow it to a neighbourhood, and we will build a one to seven day plan around independent businesses only.
trip planner
What this does
Give it a city, an optional neighbourhood, and a few preferences and it will build a structured local trip from the businesses we already know about.
Try this
I am in Bristol for two days. Keep me around Stokes Croft and Clifton. I want quiet coffee, a good bookshop, lunch under 20 pounds, and somewhere relaxed for a glass of wine in the evening.
Coverage is only as good as the businesses in the directory, so the plans improve as the database gets deeper.
The local multiplier
Spend £10 at a local shop and £6.30 stays in your town.
Spend that same tenner at a chain and only £2.40 stays local. That is the difference. More of your money goes back into local staff, local suppliers and local rent. Do that often enough and towns get stronger.
£10 · same lunch
money kept local
Independent café
locally owned
£6.30
stays local of £10
Local chain
3 to 9 outlets
£4.10
stays local of £10
National chain
head office elsewhere
£2.40
stays local of £10
source civic economics 2024↗ explore
Picked this week
See more →Worth a wander.
The trust layer
Every recommendation sits on a directory we’re verifying by hand, ownership checked against Companies House. 12 verified independents in Lincoln so far, and counting. The rest are listed and labelled honestly while we work.
No chains, no franchises, no private-equity-owned brands. Just the places that make a neighbourhood worth walking down.
The good stuff isn't on page one of Google. It's here.
Free to use, free to join, no chains for sale.