Explore Plymouth Trails around Britain’s Ocean City
The Plymouth Trails app is a free, interactive, self-guided walking tour app that acts as a personal tour guide for Plymouth, Britain’s Ocean City. It brings the city’s rich maritime, architectural, and historical sites to life using GPS mapping, audio guides, and interactive visuals. It was developed by AT Creative for Plymouth Council.
Key Features
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- Augmented Reality “Then and Now”: The app features unique archival image overlays. By pointing your phone’s camera at the street, you can fade historical photos and videos of the city over your current surroundings to compare the past and present.
- Offline Functionality: Once you download the specific trail you want to explore, the app works entirely offline, meaning you don’t need to use your mobile data while wandering the city.
- Audio & Multimedia Guides: The core trails feature GPS-triggered audio guides, as well as text, photos, and videos that play automatically as you arrive at points of interest.
- Multilingual: available in English, French, German and Spanish – and all of the content works offline.
Popular Trails Available
The app hosts a variety of tailored routes ranging from local heritage to themed walks:
- Mayflower Trail: A journey around the historic Barbican district, stepping back in time to 1620 when the Pilgrim Fathers set sail for America.
- Plymouth Hoe Trail: A coastal walk featuring sweeping sea views and maritime landmarks like Smeaton’s Tower and Tinside Lido.
- City Centre Trail: Explores the city’s impressive post-war architecture and how Plymouth was rebuilt following the devastation of the Blitz during World War II.
- Other Speciality Trails: Includes the Powerful Women Trail, Railway 200 Heritage Trail, American Tree Trail, and the Waterfront Walkway.
Since launching in 2020 the Plymouth Trails iOS and Android apps have provided tens of thousands of individual experiences for locals and visitors and further trails have been added using AT Creative’s intuitive content management system.
It has been fantastic working with Dan and AT Creative. We were looking for an app that would allow us to include several separate trails, with the flexibility to amend our offer in the future. The core functionality offered by AT Creative was exactly what we were looking for – the ability to upload audio, embed YouTube videos and for users to change text size and colour for ease of use. Image overlay was a particularly popular function that has proved simple but effective. We ended up opting for some extras including multi-language support and animation. The CMS system is really user-friendly and has given us more freedom and ownership of our content. The app was part of a larger Plymouth Trails project, which sometimes caused delays on our end. The AT Creative team were very patient and understanding, and always offered great solutions and advise. We are really happy with the finished product and can’t wait for local people and visitors to use the app to explore Plymouth’s rich heritage.
Hannah Pooley, Plymouth Trails Officer
Download the Plymouth Trails app
Why not give the Plymouth Trails app a try? Select one of the options below to open the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store.
