The TOWN Observatory is a dynamic portal providing access to four co-created digital platforms that display information about the town of Loughborough in the United Kingdom. The platforms – Colouring Loughborough, Loughborough in Motion, Loughborough Stories, and Chat Loughborough – may be accessed below, as well as from the Platforms menu item.
Colouring
Loughborough
Colouring Loughborough is co-developed with The Alan Turing Institute to showcase building and urban characteristics, such as land use, size, typology, resilience, planning controls, and heritage information such as the age of building stock.
Loughborough
in Motion
Loughborough in Motion presents information on Loughborough’s town centre through full-motion video (FMV) capability, designed to depict dynamic data such as footfall, pedestrian, and vehicle movement in a geospatial context.
Loughborough Stories
Loughborough Stories is a web-based application that combines stories, maps, videos and images created, curated, and authored by those with something to say about the town’s urban heritage and public spaces.
Chat
Loughborough
Chat Loughborough is a pioneering platform developed as part of the TraffEase AI initiative. The platform uses artificial intelligence text communication to predict pedestrian movement and footfall in the town.
See here the latest news about the project
Co-creating the Loughborough TOWN Observatory
The early experience of co-creating the TOWN Observatory is documented in an article published by the Journal of Urban Affairs, free to download here: https://doi.org/10.1080/07352166.2025.2473963. For more information see the Resources section.