Founders’ Hall seats 280. On Tuesday evening, it will need to hold rather more than that.

The Bobington Polytechnic’s spring public lecture series — free, open to all, Tuesday and Thursday evenings at 7:30 PM through April — opens tomorrow with Dr Emmeline Furness on the Meredith Letters: thirty-six personal letters discovered behind a false wall panel in the old Meredith & Blackwell warehouse on Harker Street in March, documents that have already rewritten the city’s understanding of its mid-19th-century epidemiological history.

Miriam Aldbury, the Polytechnic’s events coordinator, has been fielding enquiries since the programme was announced on 26 March. She has added thirty standing places along the side aisles and is considering a relay to an adjacent classroom.

“I have taught at this institution for eleven years,” said Aldbury. “I have never had to turn people away from a public lecture. The problem, I suspect, is that the city has been doing rather a lot of interesting things underground.”

She is not wrong. The programme reads like a syllabus of Bobington’s extraordinary spring:

8 April (Tuesday): Dr Emmeline Furness — The Meredith Letters: Private Correspondence and Public Health in Mid-Victorian Bobington. Furness will present her assessment of letters #1-18, including the discovery of references to a second fever outbreak in November 1860, previously unknown to historians, and a pen-on-linen architectural drawing of the original quay layout that locates the fever ward near the Lower Conduit route. Twenty-two letters remain under assessment.

15 April (Tuesday): Professor Aldous Nettleford, Caldwell University — The Thermal Earth: What the Greymoor Highlands Are Telling Us. Nettleford, the author of the standard text on continental geothermal systems, will present his preliminary assessment of the Greymoor phenomenon following his visit to the ridge this week with Collis and Ilkley. His comparison of the spectral data with the Blackmoor vent emissions of 1897 has already generated considerable academic interest.

17 April (Thursday): Pella Strand — Nine Hundred and Forty-Seven Metres: Mapping the Lower Conduit. The municipal surveyor who discovered and mapped almost a kilometre of buried waterway beneath the Docklands and Bramblegate. Strand’s full 60-page report was delivered to the Heritage Committee on 28 March. Seventeen notebooks. Forty-seven maps. One mason’s fish.

22 April (Tuesday): Dr Maren Huxley — The Shepherd of Dunvale: Archaeology, Identity, and the Ethics of Disturbance. Huxley will discuss the discovery and identification of Thomas Garland’s remains at the Dunvale memorial site, the bone-dating process, and the decision to leave the remains in place.

29 April (Tuesday): Closing lecture — speaker to be confirmed.

“The closing lecture is still under discussion,” said Aldbury. “I have written to someone. I am waiting to hear back.”

She declined to name the prospective speaker. Informed speculation within the Polytechnic suggests it may be Dr Odette Collis, the retired mathematics teacher whose forty-seven notebooks of observation have made her the Greymoor glow’s most devoted chronicler.

Doors open at 7 PM. No tickets required. First come, first served.