It’s just after 9 pm on Sunday 28 June and, though a week has already passed since the summer solstice, it’s still broad daylight outside. The sky is blue and clear and the garden as visible as it was at tea time.

Two hundred and ten years ago, at this very moment, a gang of troublemakers were across the other side of my home town, occupying themselves in town centre pubs as they waited for darkness to fall.

They were Luddites: disgruntled English workers protesting against the introduction of machinery to the textile industry, perceived to be lowering wages, worsening working conditions and causing unemployment for those still using traditional manufacturing methods.

The men in Loughborough that night planned to break into the Mill Street factory of local lace manufacturer John Heathcote, destroying stock and every machine they could lay their hands on.

Most had travelled in from Nottingham, though they’d arrived from every direction to disguise their identities and the true purpose of their visit. They would surprise Heathcote’s nightshift workers, storm the factory and disappear again before dawn. All they needed was darkness to arrive – and on a clear June night much like tonight, it was taking its time.

The riot that night would become one of the most significant events in Loughborough’s history, with huge financial consequences for the town and severe repercussions for the men eventually caught for it. Yet it’s a story that surprisingly few local people know in any detail.

More than a decade ago, I turned the facts into a children’s novel, inventing a ten-year-old character – Tom Rudd – to help tell the story. As he walks home along Mill Street (now Market Street), he accidentally crosses paths with real historical figures and becomes caught up in their extraordinary event.

It was a good story, I think. Sections of it certainly went down well in the writing groups and workshops where I shared them. Agents, however, weren’t very interested and, after returning to it several times over the years, I gradually lost heart and filed it away.

Tonight, though, it feels a shame to ignore it. Not least when the skies above Loughborough have such an ominous pink glow and it’s easy to imagine, somewhere across town, a group of loud, brash men gathering beneath them, tankards of ale in their hands, singing of injustices done to the working man and the revenge they were about to deliver.

Easy, too, to picture a young boy making his way through narrow streets towards them, blissfully unaware that in a few moments he’ll stumble into something that will change his life forever.

It feels time to dust off Tom’s story once again, if only briefly. So I’ve uploaded one short chapter from the unpublished novel here, in case you’d like to join me for five minutes in Loughborough on the night of 28 June 1816 …