Editorial Scrollytelling Demo

Cities Ashfield, Tuesday 14 November

The city that clocks on at midnight

By Nadia Okonjo The Ashfield Meridian6 min read

An empty city junction after midnight, wet tarmac holding the reflections of the street lights, a single van crossing

Half past one, and the city changes hands

The last northbound service clears Ashfield Central at 00:41. Twenty minutes on, the crossings stop asking to be pressed and the ring road thins to one car every forty seconds. What replaces the evening crowd is not quiet. It is eleven thousand people going to work.

The handover has no ceremony to it. On Wharf Street the last two licensed premises put their chairs up between one and half past, and the vans that restock them are double-parked outside before the shutters are properly down. Ashfield's figure for the night workforce comes from payroll returns rather than a survey, and it is 11,240 people at work between midnight and six. A fifth of them are within a mile of the market square.

The map they use is not the one printed at the bus station. Four sites carry most of the work: the interchange and its depot on Carrow Lane, the hospital trust on the western hill, the distribution park out past junction 9, and the water company's pumping station at Longmere, staffed overnight since 1961. Between them they keep a rhythm the daytime city never sees, with shift changes at 22:00, 02:00 and 06:00 and a fifteen-minute overlap built into each one.

The awkward part is getting to it and getting home again. The first bus out of Carrow Lane is the 04:52, no use at all to a picker whose shift ends at four, and the rank at the station holds two cars at that hour, both usually booked. So the car parks fill in a pattern the council has counted since spring: full at 21:30, emptying at 06:15, a third of the vehicles registered to addresses outside the city.

A maintenance worker in a hi-vis jacket alone on a platform, seen from behind, breath showing in the cold

The people paid to be awake

Roughly one worker in nineteen here is on nights, and four employers account for most of them: the transport authority, the hospital trust, a distribution park on the eastern edge, the water company. Four nights on, four off. Almost none of them see the city they keep open.

The rota is the part outsiders underestimate. Four on, four off sounds generous until it is laid over a calendar: two of every eight days fall on a weekend, and the sleep either side of a block is not sleep anybody would choose. Occupational health at the hospital trust reckons a returning worker needs two days to reset, which leaves two that belong to them. Nights pay between 18 and 27 per cent above the day rate here, depending on the employer, and the premium is the reason most people on them give for staying.

Who takes the work has changed. Ten years ago the night register at the distribution park was mostly men in their forties. The intake this autumn was 61 per cent under thirty and a little over half women, and a quarter of the new starters listed a second job on their forms. The park runs a bus of its own from the market square at 21:40, because the public one stops at half past eleven, and the seats on it are counted every night as a matter of routine.

What none of them get is the daylight version of the place they work in. Ask a night picker what the distribution park looks like from the road in July and you tend to get a pause first.

The inside of a vehicle depot at night, ranks of parked vans receding towards a closed shutter

Ninety-one buses, all pointing the same way

By half past two the depot on Carrow Lane is full. Cleaners work the aisles in pairs, fifteen minutes to a vehicle. A fitter walks the line with a torch, looking for the small faults that become a cancelled route at seven. First bus out, 04:52.

Ninety-one vehicles come back in over about ninety minutes, and they are parked to a plan: in the order they go out again rather than the order they arrive. Getting that wrong costs the morning fifteen minutes it does not have. The cleaning crew is nine people on a good night and seven on the others, working a fixed circuit of floor, poles, screens, upper deck, cab. Anything that comes in with a cracked panel or a leak is pulled out of the line and its slot closed up, so the plan survives the fault.

The workshop at the far end keeps four bays lit all night. Most of what passes through them is small: a door sensor, a wiper motor, a destination screen that has stopped agreeing with the schedule. The parts store holds around 2,300 lines and the fitters know which forty of those account for nearly every night's work. Whatever cannot be finished by five goes on a whiteboard by the door, and the first thing the morning supervisor does is read it.

At 04:40 the lights over the aisles come up to full and the drivers start arriving through a side door in ones and twos. The 04:52 leaves for the eastern estates almost empty and comes back at twenty past six with every seat taken.

A night control desk lit by a task lamp, a mug beside the keyboard and monitors out of focus behind

The desk that never goes dark

Two controllers hold the night from a first-floor room above the interchange. Pressure in the water mains, a lift stuck in a car park, an alarm that turns out to be steam. Nothing they settle tonight will be noticed tomorrow. That, they will tell you, is the job.

The room has been in the same place since the interchange was rebuilt and it looks it: eight screens, two of them carrying a camera feed nobody has needed in years, and a printer kept alive for one form the water company still wants on paper. An ordinary Tuesday brings between 140 and 190 logged calls from ten at night to six in the morning. Rather more than half are closed without anybody being sent out to them.

The rest are triage. A lift alarm in a multi-storey is a fifteen-minute job if the car is empty and an hour if it is not. A burst on a main is measured first in pressure and only afterwards in water, and the crew sent out to it will still be there when the road it has closed is wanted for the morning. The controllers keep a running list of what is open, and the entire point of the list is that it should be shorter by six.

At 05:50 the day supervisor comes up the stairs with two mugs, and the handover takes about nine minutes: what is open, what is closed, what will be somebody else's problem by nine. Outside, the first commuters are already crossing the concourse, walking through a night nobody is going to tell them about.