What kind of tent do I need?

Choose your tent to fit your plans. There are several broad categories:

Occasional weekender/summer use/festival tents: Buy a cheap tent. The only thing that's going to matter is size.

Family holidays with the car: You'll need a spacious tent, robust enough to endure some occasional rough weather. But weight does not matter. If you are going to be on the move a lot, choose a tent that is easy to pitch and strike (put up and take down).

Backpackers: You are going to carry your tent, so it will have to be as light as possible. Good, lightweight tents are expensive.

Expedition tents: These are specialist bits of kit, capable of sheltering you from a blizzard, strapped to a rock on the edge of a mountain. The cutting-edge design and materials come at a high price.

Size

Count the number of people you expect to house in your tent and add one. If tent manufacturers claim you can sleep four in their tents, they mean four close friends rubbing shoulders - with their luggage outside. If you want to sleep four, get a tent designed for five.

Weight

Weight does not really matter if you are going to bung the tent in the back of a car: you could travel with grandpa's old canvas frame tent. But it really does matter - a lot - if you are carrying your tent on your back. Backpackers should look for tents weighting less than 2kg. Alas, really specialist lightweight tents are made of rare and costly technical materials. Similar (although less acute) considerations apply if you want to camp on a cycling holiday.

Keeping out the weather

The amount of rain that tent material can fend off is given in a measurement called 'hydrostatic head' (HH), quoted in millimetres. An HH of 1000mm is just about shower-proof. For family summer camping you should be looking a tent with an HH of at least 1500mm. 2000mm is judged to have 'all-weather' capability, while expeditions tents will have a rating of 3000mm. 'Taped seams' refers to the fact that stitching in the material makes tiny holes, so the seams may be 'taped' to make them waterproof.

Single skin or double skin?

Some tents have just one layer between the snug sleeper inside and the world beyond. The skin has to be fairly impenetrable if it won't let in water during a heavy storm. But there is another problem: sleeping humans give off a lot of warm moisture, which condenses on the inside of the tent. Get up in the middle of the night and rub along the tent wall, and you'll feel as though you've had a shower. To avoid these problems, many tents have double skins: a light cotton interior, suspended within the tougher, waterproof outer skin. The inner skin should keep more or less dry. The idea developed from simple ridge tents, which had an inner skin protected by an outer flysheet, which did not reach the ground, but was held taught by guy-ropes and pegs.

Groundsheets

The floor of most modern tents consists of a sewn-in plastic groundsheet, with a high HH factor that prevents water from penetrating from below. It also usually forms the lowest 3-4 inches of the tent walls, so that water collecting on the ground outside during a rain storm cannot get in. Rain can a problem if you have a separate groundsheet - which, in any case, should never be laid so that it extends beyond the tent walls. Larger, family tents often have a sewn-in groundsheet for the double-skin sleeping compartments, and detachable groundsheets for the living area.

Cost

Simple, two- or three-person festival tents start at amazingly low prices these days. You can get a simple but serviceable two- or three-person ridge tent for just £15; small, modern dome tents start at around £30. At that price, you can even get one fitted with spring-loaded poles; you erect the tent simply by pulling it out of the bag, and throwing it the air. (How cool is that?) You can get a good four-person tent for £80, six-person for £125 - or spend up to £800 and beyond, if you want extra comfort, shelter and protection, workmanship and style.

Before you buy…

Go to a shop that has erected tents on display: this is the only way to be sure that you'll get the right tent for you.

After you buy…

Be sure to erect your tent at home before you set off on holiday, as a test run. It saves the agonies of the novice fumbling about in the half-dark on arrival at the campsite, and is a good way to check you've got all the pieces.

Dome tents

These ingenious little tents are among most convenient and cheapest available. The rigid structure is essentially formed by bendy fibreglass poles that cross over at the top. Pegging and guy-ropes are needed only to secure the tent in windy weather.

Tunnel tents

Here a set of parallel steel or fibreglass hoops are used to support a tunnel structure, held in position by guy-ropes and pegs. Tunnel tents provide good space and headroom for a family tent.

Ridge tents

Now considered rather old-fashioned, ridge tents have their merits. They are so called because the inverted V shape of the roof material forms a ridge between the two end-poles (not because you can pitch them on a mountain ridge!). They are also sometimes called A-frame tents. They have the notable disadvantage of limited headroom, with the highest space found only along the narrow central axis. In past, ridge tents could be very large, but this design is perhaps best known from the small-scale two- or three-person tents, also known as 'pup tents'.

Frame tents

First you put up the frame (a complex structure of interconnecting steel poles), then you cover it with the canvas skin. Frame tents are large and sturdy, a bit like miniature bungalows. They are good for the kind of holiday where you want to pitch the tent and stay in one place for a while.

Tipis and yurts

For a different kind of experience, try camping in a traditional Native American tipi, or a Mongolian or Kazakh yurt. Both can provide large internal, family spaces, the tipi being conical and the yurt cylindrical. Some manufacturers are making new tents based on these traditional designs - or you can rent the real thing as pre-pitched tents at certain chic campsites.