Love Southsea

Marketing, markets, and merch for Portsmouth and Southsea!

Marketing:

Across Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, we run the most popular online social pages in Portsmouth, with a highly-engaged audience of tens of thousands of local people who join us in celebrating our city’s brilliance.

As well as striving to cover as much of our island’s culture and industry without funding, we also give local businesses the chance to publish regular content to our feeds, working closely with them to help them reach people who’ll enjoy or benefit from their events, products, or services.

We’ve worked with music venues, theatres, charities, arts collectives, independent stores, shopping centres, sports outlets, car dealerships, cafés, restaurants, pubs, casinos, historic sites, travel firms, hotels, wholesalers, clubs, and loads more.

These promotional partnerships help us stay on our feet as a small business ourselves, and give us the exciting opportunity to showcase Southsea’s diverse business community to thousands.

Markets:

Louise Whitmore founded Love Southsea in 2008, setting out to give local artists and traders the chance to sell their wares whilst giving prospective visitors another reason to visit Portsmouth and showcasing the city’s cultural scene to less-aware locals.

Thus, our Love Southsea Market began. From a humble start at the Square Tower in Old Portsmouth to resounding success in the Palmerston Road precinct — growing footfall to 13,000 shoppers per market day, as tracked by camera tech — the markets have become a staple of Southsea culture.

From makers, artists, illustrators, and vintage clothes traders to jewellery makers, shabby chic sellers, and giftware stalls, plus a fine selection of street food traders, our Love Southsea Markets are diverse, exciting, and fueled by a community spirit.

We’re thankful to the businesses who use Love Southsea’s marketing services for the funding that makes our markets an effective employment and profit-turning opportunity for local creatives.

Merch:

Our promotional services and Love Southsea Markets gifted us crossed paths with hundreds of Portsmouth artists and craftspeople, so it only made sense that we began working with them on a Southsea-centric merch range!

Tees, sweatshirts, art prints, greetings cards, mugs, tote bags, and more — we’ve worked with local creatives on designs gracing countless items, all celebrating the island culture of our city. Designs include art, linework, illustration, and typography, in a range of different styles.

Sailor girls and shipmen, mermaids looking out over the America’s Cup racing on the Solent, circus elephants atop The Kings Theatre, pier-threatening krakens, vengeful dinosaurs on the common, and dapper seagulls all form part of our collection.

Our merch is available here on our website and at the Love Southsea Markets, and it’s another source of funding for us, and a way for locals to wear their civic pride wherever they go — even Southampton!