The sea wall that grows itself

Along the Merrow estuary, reefs built from old oyster shells are holding back the tide better than the concrete did.

A living reef at low tide on the Merrow estuary. Mesh bags of recycled shell give young oysters something to grow on. AI-generated

Three years ago, volunteers laid six hundred mesh bags of oyster shell along the eastern bank of the Merrow estuary, where the old concrete wall had cracked and the marsh behind it was washing away.

The shells came from the restaurants on the waterfront, which used to throw them away. Baby oysters settled on them within a season. Now the bags have vanished under a living reef that rises a few centimetres every year, by itself.

Behind the reef, the marsh has stopped shrinking. In two places it has grown back.

“Concrete is the strongest it will ever be on the day you pour it,” said Ana Brightwater, the engineer who designed the project. “A reef gets stronger every year it is alive.”

The council is now pricing a reef for the western bank. It would cost a fifth of a new wall.

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

Transport

The night buses are full. The city wants to know who is riding them.

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 →

The gasworks site at dusk. The iron frame of the last holder would stay, with a park inside it. AI-generated

Planning

Plans for 120 homes on the gasworks site go to a vote

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 →

Elspeth Calder inks the 1958 platen press. Each colour on a card is a separate run through the machine. AI-generated

Makers

The last letterpress on Harbour Street has a waiting list

The press in the back room of Calder & Daughter weighs a little over a tonne and was cast in 1958. Elspeth Calder, who is seventy-three, can tell from the sound of it whether the ink is too thick. Her father opened the shop in 1975, printing raffle tickets, menus and the order of service for half the funerals in the parish. When the copy shops arrived in the nineties, most of that work left. Calder kept the press because, she says, it was too heavy to move. Now the work has come back, for a reason her father would not have believed: people want to feel the letters. The type bites into thick cotton paper and leaves a dent you can run your thumb across. The shop prints about sixty sets of wedding invitations a year and has stopped taking bookings for next summer. Each card goes through the press once per colour. A set of a hundred and…

Continued on p. 5 →

Halden Park on Saturday, before the rain set in for good. AI-generated

Football

Rovers come from two down to draw at Halden

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…

Continued on p. 7 →