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By: Willow Anderson
Growing up, getting dragged around Loughborough by your mum was basically a rite of passage — and honestly? Looking back, it hit different than I ever gave it credit for.
Weekly food shops, trips to the Odeon, afternoons in Queen's Park, and if you were a certain kind of noughties kid, the absolutely unhinged chaos of Moshi Monsters indoor play area. Loughborough town centre shaped a good chunk of my childhood, and no matter how many people write it off as a bit rough around the edges these days, that nostalgia is real. So I went out to ask the locals whether they're still feeling their hometown — or whether the vibe has genuinely shifted.
Spoiler: the answer is complicated.
Phil (45) and Sarah (46) came to Loughborough as students and never left — which, honestly, is very much a Loughborough thing. Sarah was giving full appreciation energy: "I like how it's quite small. It's close to the countryside and we have amazing things like Bradgate Park on our doorstep. There's some great independent shops like Fleurs en Fleur and Elf Foods." But Phil wasn't about to let nostalgia cloud his judgment. He reckons the town has gone downhill over the last 20 years, especially after losing big employers like AstraZeneca and, more recently, Wilko from the high street.
Martin (55) and Laura Phillips (60) were big fans of what the town does get right — particularly its weekend markets. "With things like the gardeners market and the farmers market, those things really make a difference," Martin said, though he was quick to flag that Loughborough's music scene is basically non-existent, which is a bit of a miss. Laura, meanwhile, was giving the town credit for its university energy and rail links, but she wasn't going to pretend the empty Carillon Court shopping centre isn't a whole mood — and not a good one.
Martin Herbert (76) and Dave Russell (75) were clocking the bigger picture: the motorway access, proximity to Nottingham, Derby, and East Midlands Airport. Martin's observation that Loughborough risks blurring into Leicester as it expands toward Hathern and Shepshed is genuinely a bit unsettling if you care about the town keeping its own identity.
The person who arguably understood the assignment the most, though, was Lydia Porter (28), who has been running her jewellery shop Ooh Pretty Co inside Carillon Court for the past ten months. Rather than writing off the precinct, she's leaned fully into the community feel it still holds. "The traders you meet on the market are always quite nice," she said. "There's definitely a community feel through the Carillon and through the market — we really look out for each other." That's the kind of small-business main character energy Loughborough needs more of.
Not everyone was buying it, though. Jean King (77), Fiona Coe (48), and Joanna Rowley (52) all used the same phrase independently: "sad and tired." They're not wrong that the Loughborough high street has seen better days, with shuttered shops doing it no favours. But even they admitted the town still has everything you actually need day-to-day.
Here's the thing — there's no single, clean take on Loughborough. What I kept hearing, over and over, is that people's feelings about the town are completely tied to their personal connection with it. Whether that's student memories, a market ritual, or a childhood spent terrorising a soft play centre, it's those ties that keep people coming back. And honestly? That community glue counts for a lot more than an empty precinct.
Loughborough isn't going to be everyone's aesthetic. But if you give it a chance — especially on a market day — it might just surprise you. No cap.
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