Today we were in the charming little market town of Hebden Bridge, in the Upper Calder Valley in West Yorkshire.
Visually, its a very striking place – it’s surrounded on all sides by tall hills and the buildings in the town are made almost uniformly from very attractive yorkstone. Because of the presence of the Rochdale canal and its position at the confluence of the Hebden and Calder rivers, the town has an odd Amsterdam-like quality about it – you can’t have a really good look around the town without crossing at least three or four of its small bridges!
These days it’s a very desirable place to live, and over recent years has become home to many artists and new age folk, and it also happens to have the highest number of lesbians as a percentage of the population of any town in the UK. The very cosmopolitan make-up of the local population is reflected in the retail outlets – for a small Yorkshire town it has an inordinately large number of boutiques, swish homeware stores, coffee shops and ethnic restaurants. I should also mention that it has managed to avoid the scourge of the multiplex – the beautiful single-screen Hebden Bridge Picture House has been showing films continuously since the early 1920s
Do explore the photo gallery - hopefully it might inspire you to visit this real jewel in the Yorkshire crown. I should just mention for the record that it also has a very active ‘hyperlocal’ site, HEBDENBRIDGE web, where passions run high – you have been warned!
About Pete Stean
