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 volunteer crew of the Port Avery lifeboat were called out three times between ten on Sunday night and five on Monday morning, the busiest night the station has had since 2019. The first call was to a yacht with a fouled propeller drifting towards the rocks off Gull Point. The crew towed it into the harbour. The second, just…

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…

At quarter past two every afternoon, Kestrel Primary goes quiet. Four hundred children, their teachers, the caretaker and the two women in the office stop what they are doing and read a book. Any book, as long as it is made of paper. The school dropped written homework for its younger classes last September and gave the time back to…

A robot built from a vacuum cleaner motor and a cereal box won the regional schools final for Ashgrove Academy on Tuesday. The team of five goes to the national round in March.

Volunteers restoring the city’s last wooden tram say it will carry passengers again in the spring, for the first time since 1961. It returned to the depot on Tuesday for its final coat.

The last ferry of the day across the Merrow will keep running until at least next summer, after the council voted by twenty-two to twenty against cutting it. The crossing carries about ninety passengers a night, most of them hospital and hotel staff.

The trams stopped running in Port Avery in 1961, but they never quite left. Their rails are still under the tarmac on Station Road, and in hot summers they show through. This walk follows them from the old depot to the sea front, past the cast-iron shelter at Fiveways and the bricked-up tram shed that is now a climbing wall.…