Nobody planned this.

That is the first thing to understand about what is happening on Cooperage Lane, and it may be the most important. The lending library was not part of a municipal programme. The artists did not receive a development grant. The underground river was not on any map. The spring was forgotten for the better part of two centuries. And yet, on a Wednesday morning in March, Cooperage Lane is more alive than it has been since the last brewery closed in 1893.

Start at the eastern end, where Millicent Graves parks her handcart between the Old Cooperage and the loading dock of the former Chandler’s Brewery. The cart — a converted greengrocer’s barrow, painted green, with two shelves and a hinged lid — contains approximately four hundred books from the personal library of her late husband, Professor Lionel Graves of the Polytechnic, who died last October and left behind two thousand volumes and a wife who decided that books are better read than stored.

“If someone doesn’t bring a book back, it means they needed it more than I do,” Mrs Graves says, adjusting a row of natural history texts that the wind has rearranged. She is sixty-four, wrapped in a wool coat, and entirely unbothered by the March chill. The library is open three mornings a week. There are no fines. Arthur Penrose, publican of the Old Cooperage, provides storage and tea.

Penrose, whose cellar flooded with clear cold water a week ago — water that Pella Strand’s survey has connected to the western branch of the Lower Conduit, a buried waterway built in 1782 — is leaning in his doorway with a mug. He is philosophical about the flooding. “The building was built by people who knew the water was there,” he says. “I’ve been here twenty years and didn’t. The building knew before I did.”

The water is still flowing. Strand has traced the western branch to a purpose-built cistern chamber beneath the former Ashwater Brewery site — circular, vaulted, 1782 limestone, three channels converging at a central stone basin. It was an engineered water supply for three breweries. The spring source has been active for two hundred and forty-four years.

Walk fifty yards west and you reach the Telford Granary, where Maud Templeton and four fellow artists — Claude Renaux, Gideon Harkness, Nesta Brookes, and Elin Sayer — are converting the old grain store into shared workshops. The clearing, which began last Saturday, is nearly complete. The interior is revealed: long, high-ceilinged, exposed brick and timber, fourteen arched windows that let in a quality of riverside light that Renaux, a photographer, calls “honest.”

“I’ve been working from my landlord’s cellar on Pilot’s Alley for three years,” Renaux says, wiping plaster dust from his hands. “Dark, damp, and exactly the wrong temperature for developing. This is — well. Look at it.” He gestures at the light.

The plan is five studios, a shared exhibition room, and a communal workshop with a kiln and a forge in the old loading bay. Budget: twelve to fifteen thousand florins. An Arts Council grant is pending from the spring allocation round in early April. Studios should be functional by May.

And then there is Doris Pennock.

Mrs Pennock is eighty-four years old and lives in the ground-floor flat at number 7 Cooperage Lane, where she has lived since 1961. She is the last person on the street — possibly the last person in Bobington — who remembers the breweries.

“My mother-in-law worked at the Bramblegate Ale Works,” Mrs Pennock says, seated in a parlour that smells of lavender and coal smoke. “She was a bottle-washer. Started at fourteen. The smell of hops was in the walls. You could smell it from the river on a warm day.”

She was asked what she thinks of the changes on the street. “It’s about time,” she said. “This street has been asleep for sixty years. The library is nice. The artists are noisy. The water in Arthur’s cellar is — well, that’s always been there. We just forgot.”

Nobody planned this. A widow with a handcart. A surveyor with a notebook. Five artists with a shared ambition and a building they could afford. A spring that refused to stop flowing. Cooperage Lane is not being regenerated. It is not being developed. It is simply, quietly, remembering what it was.

The breweries are gone. The hops are gone. The bottle-washers are gone, all but one. But the water is still running beneath the street, and the light still comes through the arched windows, and on a Wednesday morning, Millicent Graves is lending books to anyone who asks.

Nobody planned this. Perhaps nobody needed to.