Loughborough Bids to Become UK Town of Culture 2028

Loughborough has formally entered the race to become the UK’s first ever Town of Culture, submitting an Expression of Interest to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s brand new national competition — with a £3 million prize and a 2028 cultural programme on the line.

Loughborough’s Town of Culture Bid: What We Know

The bid, announced in March 2026, is led by Loughborough University and Charnwood Borough Council, alongside cultural groups, education providers and community organisations. It is currently at the Expression of Interest stage — the first hurdle in a multi-stage national selection process. Should Loughborough be shortlisted, a full public consultation with residents, community groups and local organisations would follow to shape the final programme.

The competition was launched by the DCMS earlier this year, inspired by the success of the UK City of Culture programme — which has delivered transformative cultural investment to cities including Coventry and Bradford. This is the first time the competition has been opened to towns rather than cities, and the stakes are significant: the winning town receives £3 million to deliver a six-month cultural programme in 2028, with two finalists each receiving £250,000.

Loughborough is not alone in making its case. Other Leicestershire towns have also thrown their hats in the ring, with Market Harborough, Hinckley, Ashby-de-la-Zouch and Melton Mowbray all understood to have submitted Expressions of Interest before the 31 March deadline. The shortlist is expected to be announced in spring 2026.

Loughborough’s bid leans heavily on two assets that set the town apart. The first is John Taylor & Co’s bellfoundry — the last working bellfoundry in the UK, operating since 1859, which has cast more than 25,000 bells now ringing from towers in over 100 countries worldwide. The Grade II* listed site recently secured over £5 million in restoration funding, including £3.5 million from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, to secure its future as a living, working piece of British industrial heritage. The second is the historic Great Central Railway, the only double-track main line heritage railway in the country.

Alongside this heritage, the bid highlights Loughborough’s diverse and layered community — long-established South Asian communities, newer residents from across Europe, and the town’s sizeable student population, all contributing to a cultural identity that is far richer than the town’s modest national profile might suggest. If you want a sense of how Loughborough is already changing, the Loughborough property market tells its own story — demand in the town has been growing steadily as people discover what it has to offer.

What a Win Would Mean for Loughborough

The precedent set by previous City of Culture winners gives a clear indication of what is at stake. Coventry’s 2021 designation attracted an additional £183 million in investment and generated an overall economic impact of over £750 million by 2022. Bradford, the current holder, has hosted approximately 1,000 events during its tenure. These are not marginal improvements — they are genuine transformations of how a place is perceived, funded and visited.

For Loughborough, a town that punches well below its weight in terms of national cultural recognition despite having a world-class university, an extraordinary industrial heritage and a genuinely diverse community, the Town of Culture title would be a long-overdue moment of national acknowledgement.

Loughborough Deserves This — But Deserving Isn’t Enough

Let’s be straightforward about something: Loughborough has one of the most quietly remarkable cultural stories of any town in England, and almost nobody outside Leicestershire knows it.

The bellfoundry alone is the kind of asset that other towns would build entire tourist industries around. Think about it: a Grade II* listed Victorian foundry, still operating, still casting bells by hand, producing instruments that ring out from cathedrals, churches and towers in over a hundred countries. That is not a museum piece. That is a living, breathing link to a craft tradition that stretches back centuries — and it is sitting in the middle of an East Midlands market town that most people drive past on the M1 without a second thought.

The Great Central Railway — the last mainline double-track heritage railway in the country — is another asset that in any other context would be a flagship national attraction. Together, these two things should make Loughborough one of the most visited heritage destinations in the Midlands. Instead, they remain relatively well-kept local secrets.

That is not an accident. It is the result of decades in which towns like Loughborough were simply not seen as worthy of the kind of investment and attention that flows to larger cities. The Town of Culture competition is the first national programme specifically designed to correct that imbalance — and Loughborough, with its university partnership, its community depth and its heritage credentials, is precisely the kind of place it was created for.

But here is the honest concern: at the Expression of Interest stage, passion and heritage are enough to get you noticed. What wins competitions like this is a fully developed, community-rooted cultural programme with broad public buy-in. That means the next phase — the consultation, the engagement, the programme design — matters enormously. Loughborough residents need to make noise about this bid. The shortlisting panel will be looking for evidence that the town is behind it, not just the university and the council.

The competition is genuinely fierce. Market Harborough, Hinckley, Ashby and Melton are all in the mix from Leicestershire alone, and there will be strong bids from towns across the UK. Loughborough has the story. It has the heritage. It has the university network. What it needs now is the community groundswell to make the case impossible to ignore.

We’ll be covering every stage of this bid — and we’ll be making sure Loughborough’s voice is heard as loudly as possible.

Have Your Say

Do you think Loughborough should be the UK’s first Town of Culture? What would you want to see in a 2028 cultural programme for the town? Leave a comment below — the more noise Loughborough makes now, the better the chances of making the shortlist. And if you want to stay across this story as it develops, sign up for our free local news updates.