Our congratulations to Sharon Lockhart and the team at Geek Retreat in Ipswich for winning the East Anglian Daily Times Business Award for Customer Excellence In July!

Geek Retreat have been part of the MeetUpMondays family since January 2023 and both their Ipswich and Bedford branches are members of the network. Their inclusive and community focused approach fully deserves its Excellence Award! Sharon shared an insight with us for our August Newsletter, about some of the things they get up to at Geek Retreat…

“Geek Retreat has been open since October 2021 and has become a safe space for people of all ages, abilities and backgrounds. Although primarily a game shop/café hosting games like Pokémon and Magic the Gathering – we also run activities like Crochet Corner, Grandparents Morning and, of course, MeetUpMondays.

We also hosted a VE Day Tea party and hope to run more activities like this going forward. Our youngest customer was 4 days old and our most mature was 96! We have hosted 2 weddings – all customers of the shop. The second one – they actually met in the shop! This year we welcomed the first shop baby! Our Café menu has expanded to offer the vegan or vegetarian option for all items and drinks.

We were thrilled to win the EADT Suffolk Business Award for Customer Excellence.  It’s a very challenging process and we were finalists last year.  It was on advice post event that we recently launched Ipswich Together CIC (ipswichtogether.com) to bring people together with common interests. Our first project is a Minecraft room for Autistic Children.  Ipswich Together allows us to do even more for the community.”

Geek Retreat’s MeetUpMondays group is small but they come every week and would love more people to join them!

They meet on MONDAYS  11 am – 12 pm
at Geek Retreat, 41A Upper Brook Street, Ipswich, Suffolk, IP4 1DU. Call Sharon on 01473 225778 for more details or take a look at the
Geek Retreat Facebook page .  

(Featured image: Crochet Corner at Geek Retreat. All photos courtesy of Sharon Lockhart.)