The reading room at the central library on Wren Square. AI-generated
From next month the central library on Wren Square will stay open until ten on weekdays, in a two-year trial paid for by a local trust. The reading room was full most evenings last winter.
Port Avery is an invented town. Its people, stories and places are made up to show this template working, and every picture, photographs and drawings alike, is AI-generated. Replace them all with your own.
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Also in this edition
The N4 at Corn Exchange, 2.10 a.m. On weeknights, more than half of its riders are travelling to or from a shift. AI-generated
At ten past two on a Tuesday morning, the N4 pulls away from the Corn Exchange with every seat taken. A nurse coming off a late shift at St Bride’s sleeps against the window. Two cooks from the hotels on the waterfront share a bag of chips. A woman in a hi-vis jacket reads a paperback by the light over the door. None of them, the city council admits, is the passenger it had in mind. When Port Avery launched its all-night bus pilot in April, the plan was written around the weekend: students, concert crowds, people leaving the bars on Quay Street. The council paid for eleven nine Correction 19:05 routes, running every thirty minutes from midnight to five, and set itself a target of 1,200 journeys a night. The buses have averaged 2,460. The surprise is not the number but the timetable. The busiest hour is not one in the morning on a Saturday but half past four…
Continued on p. 2 →Methane bubbles trapped in layers of black ice on Lake Merrow. Each layer is a few days of the marsh breathing out. AI-generated
Kneel on the ice of Lake Merrow in January and you can read the winter beneath you. The bubbles stack in white discs, one above another, each layer frozen in place a few days after the last. They are methane, released by the mud at the bottom of the lake as dead reeds and leaves rot. For eleven winters, a team from the Merrow Field Station has counted them, measuring the discs with a tape and drilling into the largest to catch the gas. “A bubble is a little message from the mud,” said Dr Hanne Vos, who leads the team. “The warmer the mud, the more it talks.” This year the first bubbles appeared in the second week of November, the earliest the station has recorded. The team’s estimate is that the lake released about a fifth more methane last winter than it did a decade ago. That matters beyond the lake. Methane traps far more heat than carbon…
Continued on p. 6 →The gasworks site at dusk. The iron frame of the last holder would stay, with a park inside it. AI-generated
A plan to build 120 homes on the old gasworks site beside the Merrow goes to the council's planning committee next Tuesday, eleven years after the last gas holder was emptied. The site has been fenced off since 2015. The iron frame of the largest holder still stands over it, and the developer, Merrow Quay Homes, wants to keep it: the plans put a small park inside the ring of columns, with the flats arranged around it. Of the 120 homes, 36 would be offered at social rent, which is fewer than the forty percent the council's own policy asks for on large sites. The developer says the cost of cleaning the ground, which is thick with tar from a century of making gas from coal, makes the full share impossible. "We have opened every trial pit on this site," said the company's planning director, Ruth Okonedo. "We know exactly what is down there, and so does the council. It…
Continued on p. 2 →Halden Park on Saturday, before the rain set in for good. AI-generated
For seventy minutes at Halden Park on Saturday, Port Avery Rovers looked like a team that had spent the week reading about their new stand rather than training in front of it. They were two goals down by half-time, the second a header that their keeper, Danny Rourke, watched sail over him with his hands on his hips. The travelling supporters, about three hundred of them under the away end's leaking roof, sang the song about the ferry anyway. Then Kieran Asante came on. The nineteen-year-old, who works mornings at the fish market and trains in the evenings, scored with his second touch, a low shot from the edge of the box that went in off the post. Eleven minutes later he crossed for Sam Whitlow to head the equaliser. "I told him to run at them and not to think," said the manager, Gail Pennock. "He doesn't think. It's his best quality." I told him to run at them…
