There is a woman on Cooperage Lane who sells bread from a trestle table.

Her name is Imelda Cross. She is fifty-eight years old. Until February, she ran a bakery on Marchmont Street — a small place, known primarily to the people who lived nearby, which is the only audience a bakery needs. The lease was not renewed. The landlord wanted a higher rent. Mrs Cross could not pay it. She closed the shop, took the ovens she could carry, and disappeared from Marchmont Street.

She reappeared on Cooperage Lane three weeks ago. She bakes at home, loads the bread into baskets on Saturday morning, and sets up a trestle table between The Old Cooperage and the Telford Granary. She sells rye loaves, seed rolls, and a dense, dark sourdough that tastes of patience. The prices are written in chalk on a piece of slate. The table has no sign.

Last Saturday, sixty people came. Penrose, who runs the pub, put out a bench and two chairs. Millicent Graves parked her lending library handcart alongside. Nesta Brookes, the metal sculptor from the Telford Granary, displayed three small pieces on an upturned crate. By noon, the scene resembled something halfway between a market and a neighbourhood. Nobody planned it. It simply happened, as things happen when people show up.

I begin with Mrs Cross because her rhythm is the rhythm of this week.

A magistrate produced thirty-one pages of careful reasoning and found that a vacant building is a vacant building, regardless of what its owner intends to do with it someday. The arithmetic was exact. The principle was simple. The work was not glamorous. It was necessary.

A seventy-three-year-old woman with a homemade telescope learned that a comet has been named after her — a permanent feature of the night sky, discovered because she looked up every evening for forty years and one night saw something new. She asked whether this meant she had to attend another ceremony. She did not. She went back to her rooftop.

A twenty-three-year-old boatwright has fitted sixty-three beacons to sixty-three fishing boats and written the name of every captain in a blue notebook. He eats his lunch on the quay. His mother makes it for him. He has become, without intending to, the chronicler of the fleet.

A theatre has been full for fourteen nights. The play is about a man who lit the lamps. The man who wrote it has notes. The woman who manages the fly tower allowed herself a small nod when line seven held. An eighty-one-year-old retired schoolteacher came because the city came.

A footballer reached fifty points and her manager folded her arms. A treasury official signed four pages and saved eighty million florins. A bookshop is emptying itself into the hands of people who will read what it contained. A cartographer arrived from across the border to buy the maps.

And in Caldecott Square, someone is gardening in the dark.

The large things — the bonds, the bridges, the boreholes — command our attention. They should. They are consequential, and consequence is the business of a newspaper. But the city is not built by consequence alone. It is built by people who show up — every morning, every Saturday, every clear night — and do the small thing that needs doing. Bake the bread. Wire the boat. Water the wildflowers. Look through the telescope.

Mrs Cross’s sourdough, for the record, is excellent. I walked to Cooperage Lane on Saturday and bought a loaf. The crust had a particular quality of having been made by someone who has been making bread for a long time and has no intention of stopping. It was three florins. It was worth considerably more.

The table has no sign, but it doesn’t need one. The bread speaks for itself. Most things do, if you give them time.