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.

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…

For forty-one years, if you were on Harbour Street before six in the morning, the only light on was at Penhaligon's. Ruth Penhaligon, who has died aged eighty-four, opened the café at half past four for the boats and closed it at two, when she said the tea went stale and so did the conversation. She was born in a…

Nobody on the Kestrel estate remembers who planted the pear trees, because nobody did. They were nursery stock, left in the ground when the Hollins nursery closed in 1987 and the land was forgotten. The trees grew anyway. For years their fruit fell and rotted in the long grass. Then, four autumns ago, a retired teacher called Win Abbott put…