As Holmfirth became famous for Last Of The Summer Wine and Goathland likewise for popular ITV 60s-set show Heartbeat, now another Yorkshire location has been propelled into the spotlight.
Hebden Bridge, a market town sat in the Upper Calder Valley, 50 miles north of Holmfirth, is now synonymous with Happy Valley, the acclaimed, gritty BBC drama that has had more than five million viewers glued to their TV sets every Sunday, following the exploits of Sgt Catherine Cawood, played by Sarah Lancashire, and evil killer Tommy Lee Royce, among others.
Now in its third and final series, Happy Valley finally reached its conclusion on Sunday night with another hard-hitting episode, with the streets of Hebden Bridge playing out the drama in all its torrid glory. But what’s it like to actually live there, away from Sally Wainwright’s fictional storylines?
Matty Jeffreys, 26, has lived there all his life and says due to the number of holiday lets in the place, plus the fact property prices are rising, it’s getting harder for locals like himself to buy houses in the town, reports the Manchester Evening News.
“There are so many properties that are Airbnbs it makes it really hard to find a place to live,” said Matty, who resides with his partner Aoife Coatman, 23, and their three children in a council house.
“I don’t think even five years down the line we could get our own place. It’s so expensive I don’t think we’ll ever be able to afford it.”
After rising to prominence for its booming textiles industry, the town of 4,500 is now a haven for anarchists, free-thinkers, punks, hippies and socialists. But with its handsome stone terraces, cobbled high street, artisan bakers and spectacular countryside, it’s also a tourist hotspot and middle-class commuter town for workers fleeing the big cities of Manchester, Leeds and London.
Those newcomers are known locally as ‘blow-ins’ or ‘offcumdens’. There’s even a ‘Hebden Bridge offcumdens’ Facebook page with almost 3,000 members, set up to ‘provide a safe and friendly space where there is no abuse towards perceived ‘offcumdens’.
Retired social worker Christine Drake has lived in Hebden Bridge for 10 years. In that time she says she has witnessed huge changes, not all of them for the better.
“I live here and it’s not a ‘living’ town,” she said. “It is full of shops that I can’t use – I have to go to Todmorden or Halifax.
“When I first moved here it was a living town with all sorts of people and housing for them that was at least a bit affordable. Some people who have lived here their whole life have had to move.
“That is shameful. The people responsible should be ashamed.”
A two-bedroom terrace in Hebden will now set you back £150,000, with a family home like Catherine Cawood’s going for more than £350,000 and a farmhouse ‘on the tops’ – the hills – costing £650,000. But, like the UK itself, Hebden also has a very definite gap between rich and poor.
Helen Booth, a stallholder at the second-hand market on Bridge Street car park, also has strong views on the direction the town has taken. She says the town has an “overspill of middle-class idiots” who have provided an outbreak of “pretentiousness” which has led her to slowly fall out of love with the place.
“I have been trading here on and off for 20 years, in the 1980s and again in the 2000s. I have seen the customers change,” she said.
“There is snobbery... they can look down their nose at you. I have heard people say (as they pass the stall) ‘I have put better stuff in a skip’.
“A lot of don’t want it to be an expensive town, they want Hebden how it used to be. The snobs don’t want that – they want their posh shops.”
Hebden is well-connected – there’s three trains per hour to Manchester and regular buses to nearby towns such as Halifax. But its bleak, wet winters and regular flooding can leave many feeling lonely and low, and this local version of seasonal affective disorder even has its own name – ‘valley bottom fever’.
That feeling of isolation can spill over into problems with mental health and addiction.
In 2009, Jez Lewis returned to his home town to film the documentary Shed Your Tears And Walk Away about the town’s high suicide rates after he lost 15 of his friends. Wainwright has spoken of the influence it had on her and violence, poverty and addiction have remained key themes throughout all three series.
“There are drugs,” Matty said. “A lot people smoke a bit of weed, but I don’t think it’s any different to a lot of other places.
“We get a lot of anti-social behaviour, but it’s not as if that just happens in Hebden Bridge. It’s just general behaviour everywhere.
“I think what different here is because it’s a valley and it’s a small town, everyone knows everybody else’s business. So if there is a problem everybody gets to know about it – I think that’s why it’s got that reputation.”
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