The Oakhaven Gazette
Monday 21 September 2026Radworth Ward · No. 8Delivered free to every houseOakhaven City Council area
EXCLUSIVE · A FIVER A FRAME, AND ONLY THE WIRELESS WORKS
SWITCHED OFF
Two men have taken over the table at the Baulk Line, they are playing each other for money, and of the eight switches on the wall by the door the only four that do anything are the four that work the radio
A FIVER. That is what it costs to play the man who has the table at the Baulk Line, and it is not a fiver twice - win one and the next costs more.
His name is Barry. He marks, he referees and he plays, and for a fortnight nobody could get a word out of him. He has plenty to say. This week he started saying it.
The other man is Mervyn Oduya of 9 Ravensholt Avenue, who is forty-nine.
Readers of last week's front page will know where Mr Oduya goes of an evening. He is a Brother of the Order of the Unsleeping Eye and he has the eighth bay.
They start when the doors open. Reds go down. At the end of a frame they walk round the table and shake hands on it, which is more than happens in most clubs.
Nobody else has been handed a cue.
THEY DO NOT STAND LIKE SNOOKER PLAYERS
Watch them for ten minutes and something is off. Neither man gets down behind his cue the way a snooker player does. They address the ball with the stick across themselves, as though reaching round a gate.
Before either walks anywhere he turns a full circle on the spot first. Both of them. Every time.
And there are moments when two cues are out on that table and only one man is taking a shot.
THE SWITCHES
There is a panel of switches by the door. Four work the wireless, and they work: Baulk Line FM on ninety-six point two, all day, in a snooker hall.
The four above them are the lights. This paper has watched them pressed and pressed. Nothing has ever happened.
“It is the only club I have been in where the radio is easier to work than the light,” said Mitchell of Bleachfield Close.
There is a bar with a gantry, a drinks fridge and four stools facing it, and nobody behind it.
ALSO INSIDE
Signs of life
Four new fascias on the hot-food row. Page 2.
Curtain call
Twelve houses done out inside. Page 3.
Sevens up
The dark suits are recruiting. Page 3.
The Oakhaven GazetteFRONT PAGE · Page 1Continued on page 2
OUT & ABOUT
WHERE TO GO THIS WEEK
TAKEAWAYS · THE 1978 HOT-FOOD ROW
Signs of life
FOUR NEW SIGNS WENT UP ON THE HOT-FOOD ROW THIS WEEK, one on each unit, lit and legible from the far pavement for the first time since anybody can remember.
Kebabylon. The Radworth Balti House, est. 1978. Golden Fortune. Slice Slice Baby.
There is a menu board at every counter now, and a price against every line on it, which is the part this paper cares about.
A large doner is eight pounds fifty and doner meat and chips is eight pounds flat. A lamb balti is ten ninety-five, with pilau rice three fifty and a garlic naan three twenty-five on top of that. Beef in black bean sauce is nine fifty. Salt and pepper chips are five fifty.
A twelve-inch margherita is nine ninety-nine and a meat feast is thirteen forty-nine, which for a twelve-inch pizza on this estate is a statement of intent.
Nobody has been served on this row either.
Two more signs have been made and have nowhere to hang. Jerk Hut and Burger Boss are to go up at the far end, past the pizza shop, and the units are not built. Half a jerk chicken with rice and peas is to be eleven fifty; a double smash burger meal ten forty-nine.
“They have given us six shop signs and nought dinners,” said Yvonne of 12 Coalpit Court. “I can read what I am not having from two hundred yards away.”
THE RIVER · THE NEW QUAY
Boathouse rock
SIXTY METRES OF PAVED PROMENADE have been laid along the Oakhaven, four and a half metres wide, sitting on a stone wall that drops straight into the water.
Three flights of stone steps go down to the river off it. Seven stone bollards line the outer edge. Two rowing boats are moored off.
There is a brick boathouse with three real arches in it and a willow beside it. It is the best-looking thing built in this town this year and this paper is not going to pretend otherwise.
You cannot get to it and you cannot get off it.
No path connects the new promenade to anything above it. It is sixty metres of very good paving between a river and a hillside, and the way on to it is across the grass.
The reeds have not been told either. They are already coming up through the new stone.
“That is our second path this month that starts nowhere,” said Les of 48 Bestholme Boulevard. “I am beginning to think it is deliberate.”
The Oakhaven GazetteOUT & ABOUT · Page 2Continued on page 3
THE ESTATE
COUNCIL · TRADE · HOUSING
RADWORTH ROAD · THE ODD SIDE
Curtain call
TWELVE HOUSES ON RADWORTH ROAD HAVE BEEN DONE OUT INSIDE - numbers seven to twenty-nine, the odd side, eighty-eight metres end to end.
Sixty rooms between them. Eighty-four windows, and every one of those windows is now properly dressed, which a week ago fifty-six of them were not.
Ninety-two things have been hung on the walls. Three lights to a house, thirty-six in all.
And the skirting board no longer runs straight through the staircase. It used to. Nine lengths of it a house, in all twelve houses, sailing through the flight as though the stairs were a rumour.
Each house has its own carpet and its own wallpaper. No two are the same.
This paper has two complaints and they are small ones. The ceilings are dark, because there is one bulb doing all the work in each room. And the pot plants would not fool a cat.
Nobody this paper spoke to has been let into one of them.
“They have done out twelve front rooms on my side of the road and not one of them is mine,” said Vera of 11 Radworth Road. “I have asked.”
POPPLEWICK TERRACE · THE ORDER
Sevens up
SEVEN HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-SEVEN POUNDS AND SEVENTY-SEVEN PENCE. That is what the Order of the Unsleeping Eye says it has raised for charity, and it has gone to the trouble of telling the whole town the exact figure.
There is now a rack of handbills inside the bronze doors, on the wall by the Tyler's desk, with three of them standing in the top row of pockets. They carry a telephone number: 01632 960725.
They are recruiting.
A week ago this was fourteen men who would not say what they were for. Now it is fourteen men with a leaflet, a good cause and a phone line.
CORRECTION
Master of none
We said last week that Harold Prentice of 14 Wheelwright Close, the Worshipful Master, is fifty-eight. He is seventy-two. We are sorry, and so, we are told, is he.
PLOT R7 · LAST TENNER BETS
Shelf defence
THE WRITING LEDGE IN THE BETTING SHOP STOOD FIFTY-SIX CENTIMETRES OUT ACROSS ITS OWN DOORWAY - a metre-high shelf with a leg, a bracket, a foot rail and a slip holder on it, square in the way of anybody coming in.
It has been cut back. The nearest thing to the door frame now is the ledge itself at twenty centimetres, and the bin that used to sit seven centimetres off the jamb is forty-two away.
The counter on the right-hand wall has gone altogether.
It was flush to the wall with the feature wall behind it, so there was nowhere for a member of staff to stand. That wall is now empty floor, and the shop says it is staying that way.
The Oakhaven GazetteTHE ESTATE · Page 3Continued on page 4
YOUR SHOUT
WRITE TO THE EDITOR
SPORT
One hundred and four
A golf ball was struck on the Radworth course this week and went a hundred and four metres: sixty-eight of them through the air and thirty-six along the ground.
That is the whole report. One ball. Nobody has played a hole, nobody has holed a putt, and the eighteen greens up there have still never had a flag walked up to them.
IN BRIEF
Still not emptied
The wagon is still on Tollerton Rise in full council livery, the two men in orange are still stood behind it, and the bins are still out. Nobody has been taken on. Five editions.
CRIME
Three hundred and ninety-nine
Still three hundred and ninety-nine tags. Seventh week. Brick, render, doors, shutters and the wheelie bins. Not one of them painted over.
THE EDITOR WRITES
A fiver, a fascia and a flight of steps
Every week this paper prints a list of good things that have arrived and a list of reasons you cannot have them, and every week somebody writes in to say we are miserable.
So look at this week honestly. Four shop signs went up over four kitchens with full menus behind them. Twelve houses were furnished down to the pictures on the walls. Sixty metres of quay went in beside the river with a boathouse on it. Two men sat down to snooker for money.
Two men. Not four, not a league. Two.
And there is the whole of it. Radworth is being built beautifully and populated by almost nobody. There is a bar with no barman, a row of kitchens with no queue, twelve furnished front rooms with nobody sat in them and the best quay in the county with no path to it.
The one place in this town where somebody will take your money is a snooker table, and the man holding the other cue cannot get the light on.
Put a bulb in it
I went in the snooker club after reading your piece last week. Lovely table. I pressed all four of those switches eleven times.
I then found the wireless by accident and could not turn that off either.
KEITH, 3 Ropewalk Close
Sixty metres to nowhere
I walked down the grass to the new quay because there is no other way of getting on it, walked its whole length, looked at the boats, and walked back up the grass.
It was the best forty minutes I have had this year and I would like someone to explain why it is a secret.
LES, 48 Bestholme Boulevard
My wall is not for hire
Further to the twelve houses. Mine is one of the twelve. Nobody asked me about the wallpaper and nobody asked me about the three pictures that are now up in my back room.
They are not my pictures.
DEREK, 19 Radworth Road
Still no children
Sixth time of writing. We now have a temple with a leaflet rack, a quay, a boathouse, a snooker club with two players in it, six takeaway signs and a hundred and four metres of golf.
No kids. Not one.
TRACEY, 57 Limekiln Close
The tags are still up
Seventh week. Both ginnels, the gable ends, the shutters. Three hundred and ninety-nine of them and not one painted over.
I said print it every week. Print it every week.
HOLLY, Marlpit Boulevard
The Oakhaven GazetteYOUR SHOUT · Page 4End of this issue