As it happened: West of England

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A retired university lecturer has declared his Gloucestershire home an independent republic in a bid to defy Brexit.

Dr William Riches, 77, from Newnham on Severn, said he is making a stand because he disagrees with the UK withdrawing from the European Union.

He lives in the Forest of Dean where 59% of people voted to leave.

The staunch Remainer says he cannot see a future for the country.

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One of the things I'll always remember was the sight of one of our cameramen coming back to the BBC Points West studio covered in blood from a head wound.

He'd been out filming and had been struck with a piece of scaffold pole during the disturbance.

The camera was a write-off but luckily it had taken much of the impact.

He said he had lots of good pictures on the tape but that was jammed inside the camera.

Thinking there was nothing to lose I started dismantling a rather expensive camera using a big screwdriver as a crowbar.

We managed to get the tape out and transferred it in to an unbroken cassette in a record-breaking time.

Remarkably it played and was used minutes later in the news bulletin with pictures right up to the moment the camera was destroyed and the picture turned to snow.

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A police officer accused of pulling "sickies" to go horse racing has told a misconduct hearing the police station in Gloucester was "toxic".

PC Jonathan Adams, a probationary officer, said working at Barton Street was "horrible" and he dreaded going into work.

He told the panel he suffered stomach cramps and migraines and had not lied about being sick on the three occasions he went to the races.

"It was the worst time I ever had, the worst. I didn't want to let the team down but I didn't want to go into that environment because it was toxic," he said.

"I saw it as getting myself better for a day, get out of that environment, get myself better."

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July 17th 1992

I remember it was a hot day – the same as it is today, 25 years on. Sticky and humid.

We knew there had been a crash involving the police in Hartcliffe but we couldn’t guess the consequences. With hindsight we should have seen what was coming – after all, these were economically troubled times – unemployment was rising and by the end of that year three million would be out of work - with the official rate around 10.6%.

Black Wednesday wasn’t far away. Negative equity was about to enter our vocabulary. We were all feeling the pinch but in Hartcliffe it was worse. Lots of shops had shut: there was nowhere to go, nothing to do and no money. Hartcliffe was restless and broke.

I was dispatched in the conspicuous BBC radio car with a giant reel-to-reel tape recorder, in the post-riot calm of the day after the night before. Shops had broken windows, the library had been set on fire, there was a lot of clearing up. Police cars were on corners. There weren’t many people around and those that were didn’t want to talk to a young reporter with a great big microphone.

Suspicion and anger hung in the air. It seemed the only people up and about that morning were heading for the butchers and mostly to buy strings of chitterling. I joined the queue hoping that somebody or even the busy butcher himself would finally talk to me. I couldn’t go back empty-handed.

What had they seen? Why did it happen? Would there be more?

When I made it to the front and the shop had quietened down after the lunch rush I was finally given an interview. For the butcher and the rest of the queue what had happened the night before came as no real surprise: Hartcliffe was dying, felt forgotten and people living there were fed up.

The butcher shop was one of the few surviving business - but for how much longer? They all told me it was never going to take much for Hartcliffe to explode – everything was gone and there was nothing to lose. It was only a question of time.

Gloucestershire Constabulary says a 39-year-old woman was assaulted in Charles Street, Gloucester, in the early hours of Saturday morning.

The offender spoke with a foreign accent and is described by police as white, of medium to large build with short dark hair and he was wearing a white top.

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I must have moved on to try to find my interviewees, because I know I went into one of the tower blocks further down the estate and knocked on doors.

One young single mum spoke to me. She was very anxious that she should remain anonymous and that no-one saw me enter or leave her flat. She had known, from a distance, one of the men who died. She had watched the fires and running men and women from her window overnight.

Now she, too, felt unsafe.

She told me she thought the riots would have happened with or without the men’s deaths, because everyone was so fed up of not being helped or listened to.

There were small pockets of unrest still happening across the estate. Walking back to my radio car I remember, at one point, a group of agitated teenagers running around the corner towards me, shouting.

For a few seconds I wasn’t sure whether they were running at me: I was carrying a very visible BBC tape recorder and microphone - but the group passed on. In a parting shot, one of them threw a brick at the car as I drove away. I was quite lucky. Some of my colleagues did not fare as well.

A burst water main has resulted in "large amounts of water" flooding a road in Somerset.

Fire crews tweeted that Lyde Road in Yeovil was flooded and road closures were being put in place.

Wessex Water said it was working to repair the leak and apologised to customers who are without water.

A solar hot air balloon - billed as a world first - has been put through its paces at a primary school in Bristol.

Ahead of this year’s Bristol International Balloon Fiesta, the hybrid solar powered balloon was at Hannah More Primary School demonstrating how the pioneering balloon works.

Developed by Cameron Balloons, the black side of the balloon absorbs the sun's rays to make the air inside hotter than the ambient temperature while the silver side prevents heat from escaping.

Simon Proctor, from Bristol Energy, said: “It’s this kind of very simple science that gets people, young and old, excited about green energy."

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A police officer threw a "sickie" three times in order to watch horse racing, a misconduct hearing has been told.

PC Jonathan Adams part-owns a horse with a racing syndicate and on one of the occasions was seen celebrating a win on television, the panel heard.

He faces three allegations of gross misconduct under "honesty and integrity" but denies lying.

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I parked my BBC Radio Bristol car near to Symes Avenue – a central row of shops on the estate. Many of the shops and the local library had been looted and burned out overnight and were smouldering acrid black smoke.

I remember picking my way across broken glass along the row of ruined shops and talking to a shopkeeper trying to pick out anything of worth still remaining.

This was a riot of the masses against what they perceived as the establishment – the have-nots against those who had more – and their local shops had fallen into the latter group in the rioters’ minds.

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Hardly anyone was willing to speak to the BBC, for the same reasons. I mostly got waved away by young and old alike.

But the shopkeeper talked to me: he was shocked at what he saw as a personal attack on him and his family’s livelihood, after being a local resource for many years.

One elderly woman was very tearful about where she was now going to buy what she needed.

But the passions of a group of young men I spoke to were clearly still running high and I instinctively did not press them to talk to me.

More follows...

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What is this?

Claire in Cheltenham sent in the picture, taken this afternoon, saying it was "huge".

"It looked too big to be a wasp. It flew towards me and I was like 'woah, what on earth is that?!'," she said.

"Definitely seemed more like a bumble bee in size than a wasp."

Tweet your answers to @BBCBristol.

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Police are advising people not to take "matters into their own hands" after a Bristol woman stole her own bike back from thieves.

Jenni Morton-Humphreys spotted her stolen bike for sale on Facebook.

Posing as a prospective buyer, she arranged to take the bike for a "test drive" and sped off with it instead.

Quote Message: We’d advise against people taking matters into their own hands due to the risks involved and the fact it provides criminals with an opportunity to destroy evidence before we can investigate them. In this case we’ve carried out a full investigation into the theft of the bike and exhausted all current possible lines of enquiry pending new information. from Spokesperson Avon and Somerset Police

We’d advise against people taking matters into their own hands due to the risks involved and the fact it provides criminals with an opportunity to destroy evidence before we can investigate them. In this case we’ve carried out a full investigation into the theft of the bike and exhausted all current possible lines of enquiry pending new information.

Staff at Bristol Temple Meads are having a clear-out of bikes.

Any bikes that have been abandoned are going to be removed from the platform and put in storage for 28 days before being donated to charity.

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So-called "nighthawkers" who hunt for buried ancient artefacts are targeting farmland in Gloucestershire.

The illegal practice involves people using metal detectors at night to hunt for valuable objects.

Gloucestershire Police Sgt Garrett Gloyne said: "It happens at a particular time of year after farmers have harvested crops and fields have been ploughed."

He warned if someone is found using a metal detector on a scheduled ancient monument they could be arrested, and also urged the public to notify the force of any suspicious activity.

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More people than ever before went to this weekend's Royal International Air Tattoo at RAF Fairford.

Some 160,000 made the event which marked the 70th anniversary of the US Air Force.

Highlights included the Red Arrows performing alongside their American equivalents The Thunderbirds.