Issue 84 · Autumn 2026 · Free in 60 shops and cafés

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Food and drink, what’s on, business, people and opinion. New stories every week online, and the best of them in print on the first Friday of the month.

Food and drink, what’s on, business, people and opinion. New stories every week online, and the best of them in print on the first Friday of the month.

Food and drink

New openings, old favourites and what’s good at the market this week.

Rows of floured sourdough loaves cooling on a wire rack

Food and drink

The bakery that opens at five so the bus drivers get breakfast

Flour & Fern on Station Road bakes through the night and sells its first loaves before the sun is up. We spent a morning behind the counter.

Ruby Ainsworth

·

A pint of bitter on a copper table beside a pub fire

Food and drink

Twelve Sunday roasts, ranked by someone who ate all of them

Six weekends, twelve pubs and one very patient dentist. Where to go for the best roast in and around Brantwick, and where the gravy let us down.

Ruby Ainsworth

·

Stalls and shoppers under the iron roof of an old market hall

Food and drink

Inside the Market Hall’s new food row

Six empty stalls at the back of the Market Hall have become the busiest lunch spot in town. Here’s who’s cooking and what it costs.

Ruby Ainsworth

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What’s on

Gigs, festivals, talks and the things worth leaving the house for.

People singing and carrying glowing paper lanterns at dusk

What's on

The Lantern Parade is back, and this year it goes past the river

After two years on a shortened route, the town’s oldest night out returns to the full walk from Market Square to the Wharf, with 600 lanterns and a brass band at the end.

Helen Marsh

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Rows of red seats facing the screen in a small cinema

What's on

The church hall cinema that sells out every Thursday

Seventy seats, a borrowed projector and an interval for tea and cake. How a few volunteers built the town’s favourite night out.

Sam Okafor

·

A choir in matching jackets singing in a chapel with a pipe organ

What's on

Brantwick Community Choir wants more tenors (and anyone else)

Sixty voices, no auditions and a concert on 18 October. The choir is recruiting, and it really does mean anyone.

Sam Okafor

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Business

The shops, workshops and start-ups that keep the town centre going.

A mechanic in a red hoodie truing a bike wheel in a workshop

Business

The bike shop that fixed half the town’s bikes for free

Spoke & Chain ran a free repair morning every month for a year. It cost them about £4,000 in parts and brought in more customers than any advert.

Tom Ridley

·

A row of small shopfronts under a red-brick building

Business

Three shops, one shopfront: the Bridge Street experiment

A florist, a picture framer and a repair café have split the rent on one of the town’s biggest empty units. Six months in, all three are still trading.

Tom Ridley

·

A woman browsing shelves in a crowded independent bookshop

Business

Why the bookshop on Corn Street is still here after 40 years

Online shopping should have closed it twice. Instead, Corn Street Books has had its best year since 2008. The owners explain how.

Tom Ridley

·

A café with tables outside in a stone-built town square

Business

The café in the old bank where the vault is now a playroom

The bank on Market Square closed in 2021. Now its vault has soft play, its counter serves flat whites and its manager comes in every morning.

Tom Ridley

·

People

Neighbours worth knowing, in their own words.

An older man in a flat cap and sunglasses smiling outside a shop

People

Thirty-one years on the crossing, and Ray Dunn knows every name

Ray has seen three generations of Brantwick children across Station Road. He retires at half term, and the school is planning a send-off.

Helen Marsh

·

A woman tending vegetable beds on an allotment

People

At 91, Kamala is the oldest plot holder on the Mill Lane allotments

She took on plot 14 in 1961 and hasn’t missed a season since. Her advice: grow what you like eating, and never trust a warm April.

Sam Okafor

·

Opinion

Columns and letters. Agree, disagree, write back.

An empty bus shelter beside a road through flat fields at dusk

Opinion

The 14 bus timetable is a puzzle nobody asked to solve

The new timetable cuts the last bus home from Lower Ashby to 6:10pm. That isn’t a bus service. It’s a suggestion.

Graham Pell

·

Someone reading at a desk between tall library shelves

Opinion

Keep the library open on Saturdays. It’s the busiest day it has

The council wants to save £18,000 a year by closing the library on Saturdays. The visitor figures say that’s exactly the wrong day.

Graham Pell

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