Welcome to a slightly late on a Wednesday bonus edition of Local Authority. Since the last regular newsletter that I sent last week, I’ve since spent a few days in Cardiff, went to a music festival where I got to DJ and somehow triggered a conga line, looked after a cat, and now I’m staying in Ramsgate for a few days. Maybe I’ll come back to Medway at some point.

Once again, there’s been quite a few new paid supporters over the last month - thank you! These extra editions take various forms, and an occasional series I run features a look at other Medways from around the world. You’ll find a full list of our previous visits at the bottom of this email if you’d like to catch up on our global Medway tour.

If I asked you how many places in the world are called Rochester, I suspect you’d guess two (our one and the New York one) or maybe three or four if you happened to know of another one or at least thought there must be a few others around. It’s what I would have done before I started researching these things.

It turns out there are a lot of places called Rochester.

To be precise, there are 23 of them.

There’s one in Australia. There’s one in Canada. There’s no less than 19 in the US. But today we’re sticking closer to home.

There’s another Rochester in the UK.

Let’s head to Northumberland.