Jackie Lambert 2024-2 (M)

That Was So Hebden Bridge by Jackie Lambert

“What’s that strange noise?” I asked my husband, Mark.

We’d been at large in The Beast, our 24.5-tonne self-converted truck camper, for just over a week. However, our huge vintage Iron Lady was causing a few concerns. Two gas leaks and one water leak into our travels, a lesson we’d already learned was: ‘Never ignore strange noises or smells.’

We’d fitted deflector bars to the cab to lift tree branches over our roof, so they didn’t snag on the solar panels. Finally, we identified them as the cause of the ominous drumming sound every time we took a corner. They were catching on the habitation box, and had already scraped off some paint. Inside, the window handles didn’t clear the frames and wouldn’t close properly, so we’d made an appointment with the supplier, Kellett Windows in Halifax, to get them fixed.

Eventually, we found Kellet Windows, but not before we’d rumbled and twisted through a maze of narrow cobbled streets designed to accommodate horses and carts as opposed to 6-wheel overland trucks.

It was a pleasure to meet the owner, Victoria, at last. During the build, we’d spoken so many times on the phone. A cheerful chat with Vic always gave us a lift that lasted all day.

Michael, Kellet’s chief engineer, soon fixed the windows. Afterwards, in the spirit of Kellet’s ‘service beyond the call of duty’, he clambered up on The Beast’s roof with an angle grinder and removed a chunk from the deflector bars to stop the banging. In the meantime, Vic and I had a chat. She made me a cup of tea and asked where we might stay that night.

“We’ve no idea!” I replied.

“Hebden Bridge is lovely,” she said, so we went there.

***

‘Lovely’ is certainly not how Sir Bernard Ingham, former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s press secretary, described his hometown.

In his column in the Hebden Bridge Times, he declared it tantamount to Sodom and Gomorrah.

In recent history, the town, whose smoke-blackened stone buildings, varnished with rain, cling to precipitous valley sides, gave itself a somewhat unconventional makeover.

During the 1800s, Hebden Bridge was such a thriving centre for clothing manufacture, it was known as ‘Trouser Town’. Sheep grazing the barren moorland above supplied wool, while fast-flowing streams rushing down from the same Pennine hills provided the perfect power-source for cloth-making mills. The town was famous for fustian, a type of heavy corduroy used to create workwear fit for real men.

Sadly, by the 1960s, the industry had declined and ‘Fustianopolis’ deteriorated into a slum. As property prices plummeted, squatters, artists, and hippies moved in. Then, in a clash of tie dye and tweed, these ‘offcumdens’, as locals call outsiders, formed a community group. They cleaned up and preserved the town’s old buildings, and enabled Hebden Bridge to rise like a phoenix of alternative culture from the ashes of its industrial heritage.

These days, you need a lottery win to buy a property, while Fustian and Phoenix are more likely to be a gender-neutral couple running a café in the square serving vegan treats for cats. The expression, ‘Getting the bus to Hebden Bridge’ means coming out as a lesbian, because this little place in the heart of the Calder Valley, with a population of around 4,500, is the self-proclaimed lesbian capital of Great Britain.

Yet one commentator’s description of Hebden Bridge as ‘a drug town with a tourist problem’ could explain some of Sir Bernard Ingham’s gripes. Happy Valley, a TV drama set and filmed in the area, took its title from the nickname used by police to reference widespread substance abuse.

However, there are many more positives.

In 2011, British Airways’ High Life magazine named Hebden Bridge the fourth quirkiest town in the world!

Hebden Bridge boasts even more cafés per head of population than it does beardy blokes with straggly ponytails or man buns. It prides itself on its range of independent shops. So, if you’re running low on anything handmade, eco-friendly, renewable, sustainable, or farm fresh, HB is your baby. Likewise, if you want to workshop your inner wizard, discover your wild woman within, or line dance with your ancestors before you stock up on fair-trade fridge magnets and ethical ear muffs crafted from locally foraged lichen, squirrel poo, and repurposed barbed wire, this is the place to come.

I once heard about a woman in Barrow-in-Furness who offered re-birthing. Armed only with some drain pipes and a tin of castor oil, she’d pop you in at one end and leave you to work your way through. Then, she’d slap you on the bum, give you a spoon of castor oil, and you were re-born.

In Hebden Bridge, she’d fit right in.

As we drove The Beast, past the cafés, looking for a stopover, Mark spotted a couple of rainbow-haired hippies at a bus stop.

“They look like they might know somewhere we could park tonight,” he said, as he pulled over and addressed them from on high in the cab.

“There’s a place up the road that opens out onto a woodland,” they said, before sending us on our way with a waft of patchouli-scented directions.

Perfect!

Except here was another lesson.

The public at large radically underestimates the size of our vehicle.

Their instructions led us up a narrow serpentine street with cars parked on either side. Half a mile in, we stopped to stare at an unfortunate inconvenience. Between us and our arboreal Nirvana stood a belligerently low railway bridge.

The Beast is 3.85 m high.

“You’ll never get under that!” I stated the obvious, but we were already down the rabbit hole. The Beast is also 10 m long, so at this point, neither could we turn around.

Our van, Big Blue and Caravan Kismet, which in tandem comprised our previous home-on-wheels, were the length of an articulated lorry. Wordlessly, as had happened so often in our half-decade of travels, I swung out of the cab, pulled on a Hi Vis waistcoat, and guided Mark back. Then I strode manfully into the middle of the main road to stop the traffic while he reversed out.

Unsure what to do once we’d extricated ourselves, we headed back towards Hebden Bridge and its cafés. The populace spilled out on to the pavements in the late afternoon sunshine. We would have loved to join them, but there was nowhere to stop.

Every time we rounded a bend, our deflector bars continued playing a low frequency timpanic solo on the roof behind the cab. On our way to the woods, I had spotted a garage on the near side of the road.

“Look. Red lorry, yellow lorry!” I’d joked, referencing two magnificent bull-nosed trucks they had on display.

As we passed it on the way back, I had to lunge for the inner door pull to steady myself as Mark slewed across the road on to the forecourt.

Mark was half way out of the cab as he announced, “I’m going to see if they’ve got an angle grinder we can borrow.”

Like oil-spattered zombies, a crowd of mechanics in navy blue overalls crawled out of the inspection pit and gathered around to stare at our truck. Although it was near closing time on a Friday, they were amenable to Mark’s curious request. In these early days, another truck truth we were discovering was how much our magnificent Beast opens doors.

On the grounds of ‘Elf and Safety’, they declined to clamber nearly four metres up on to The Beast’s roof, wielding a power tool. However, they granted Mark the freedom to risk his own life and limbs, and deploy their angle grinder at the altitude of his choice.

The blade wasn’t big enough to slice fully through the bars, so Mark had to finish the cuts with a hacksaw. I remained on terra firma, chatting about The Beast with one mechanic, who took me over to see the bull nosed trucks.

“The red one does stunts,” he said. “It’s a wheelie truck.”

“No way!” I replied, and decided on the spot not to tell Mark, lest he viewed it as a challenge similar to road signs which declare, ‘Unsuitable for Heavy Goods Vehicles’.

As we drove back into town, we realised that, despite its ardour for alternative lifestyles, Hebden Bridge couldn’t accommodate those choosing to do so on wheels.

Despite being a complete virgin only the day before, I was getting rather nimble with my Park4Night app. With our ever-shortening roof deflectors, we set off in search of a cricket club in nearby Mytholmroyd, which promised a place to park right on the banks of the Rochdale Canal. It was a short walk from Hebden Bridge, and close to a very famous address.

This part of West Yorkshire boasts a notable literary legacy. Just a few miles over the moors is Howarth, whose vicarage was home to the Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne. A vet called James Alfred Wright wrote about his life in the area. Better known as James Herriot, his bestselling book All Creatures Great and Small was adapted into several TV series’. And who could forget Takayoshi Andoh’s inimitable Memoirs of a Japanese Chicken Sexer in 1935 Hebden Bridge?

And yes. That is a real book.

A hawk’s stoop from The Beast’s doorstep lay 1, Aspinall Street, Mytholmroyd, where poet laureate Ted Hughes was born. He married the American writer, Sylvia Plath, in 1956, although when you read their poems, a happy couple living in Happy Valley seems a long shot. They separated just six years later, in 1962, when Hughes started an affair. Then in 1963, aged only 30, Plath committed suicide. Her grave is in nearby Heptonstall, where feminists frequently chisel off the ‘Hughes’ part of her surname from her gravestone.

From bed, we could see the Rochdale Canal, where Hughes fished a child. Along with the surrounding Pennine moors and its wildlife, the canal featured in much of Hughes’ poetry.

The following day, in what I could only describe as grey mizzle, we walked along the sodden canal into Hebden Bridge. In a fug of earthy summer smells released by the rain, The Fab Four, our four pups, splashed joyfully through puddles on the black cinder towpath, which ran parallel to the River Calder and the main Burnley Road. Derelict narrowboats lined the canal. A damp patina of moss and mould decorated their faded turquoise and purple paintwork. With Buddhas on their roofs and dream catchers in their windows, they were the new age community’s floating antidote to the area’s unaffordable property prices. The throbbing generator of one moored next to our park up had lulled us to sleep.

The Rochdale canal is an incredible feat of engineering. In 1804, it became the first of three trans-Pennine waterways to open, winning the race to cross the hills known as ‘the backbone of England’. It connects the city of Manchester with Sowerby Bridge in Calderdale. By going straight over the top, it bypassed the issues with tunnels which bedevilled its rivals, the Leeds-Liverpool and Huddersfield Narrow Canals. Although it is only 32 miles long, the steep climb required 91 locks.

Despite this, the Huddersfield Narrow beat the Rochdale to the title of ‘Highest Canal in Britain’ by 45 feet, and the Bingley ‘Five Rise’ on the Leeds-Liverpool claims the steepest flight of locks. The Huddersfield Narrow Canal also holds the record as the highest, longest, and deepest canal tunnel in the UK. It took sixteen years to complete, but at an altitude of 645 ft and a maximum depth of 638 ft, the Standedge Tunnel gouged its way beneath the Pennine summits for 3.5 miles.

At Hawksclough, cars swished past on wet tarmac as we paused under dripping trees to admire a rusting cast iron sculpture. A hawk crouched on a tall tree stump, clutching a small bird in its talons references the Ted Hughes poem, Hawk Roosting, which explores the uplifting theme of ripping off heads. Apparently, inspiration for the poem came from Hughes and his childhood friend, Donald Crossley, who observed a hawk while playing in Red Acre wood.

A squat factory chimney and the blank four-storey edifices of industrial buildings lined our moist approach into Hebden Bridge. Built from dressed blocks of coarse-grained local sandstone called millstone grit, regiments of tall windows punctuated the taupe-coloured facades. Once dark satanic mills, they are now home to fancy restaurants, purveyors of craft beer, or expensive canal-side apartments for the well-to-do of Leeds and Manchester.

These days, with its trio of watercourses (two natural, one man-made), the town could rename itself Hebden Bridges. But when we left the canal and entered the town, we walked over THE Hebden Bridge. Two of its three elegant arches span Hebden Water, a tributary of the River Calder. In very Hebden Bridge fashion, the third soars majestically over dry land, but this is because it spanned the goit, a watercourse for the mill, which was filled in as the town expanded.

The local gritstone is prized for its durability, and this particular rocky road has survived the Yorkshire climate since 1510. We crossed the cobbled walkway, iron grey and slick with rain, and plonked ourselves down on outside chairs to partake of coffee and a cake in the dry, as rain pattered gently on the café’s awning.

As Mark went inside to order, I chatted with a lady at the next table.

“Hebden Bridge is famous for dock pudding,” she told me. “Every April, they hold the World Dock Pudding Championships at the leisure centre in Mytholmroyd.”

“I’ve heard of Yorkshire Pudding, but not dock pudding,” I replied. “What is that?”

“It’s a local delicacy made from a special kind of dock leaf, mixed with stinging nettles, oatmeal, and onions.”

“Stinging nettles?!” That sounded so Hebden Bridge.

“Yes – it’s usually one-third dock to two-thirds nettles, but everyone has their own ‘mystery ingredients’. It’s fried in bacon fat and served as part of a traditional Yorkshire breakfast, with bacon, sausages, and egg.”

When I looked it up later, I found that in ‘the olden days’, dock pudding was an important source of vitamin C. By spring, the population was on the brink of scurvy after a winter eating only preserved vegetables. ‘Sweet’ or ‘Passion’ docks and tender nettle tops were the first greens to come through, and could be mixed with whatever else was around, such as sorrel, spinach, chives, or raspberry leaves. Dock pudding made it on to German radio during WWII. Propagandist William Joyce, better known as Lord Haw Haw, reported that food rationing was so bad that Yorkshire was eating grass!

Actor Robbie Coltrane, who played Hagrid in the Harry Potter films, came second in the 2007 Dock Pudding Championship. In 2013, the Yorkshire weather caused the event to be cancelled. It was too wet for the Bistort docks to grow, so they held a car boot sale instead. But in 2004, there was outrage when Jetta, a Danish chef who worked in one of the many cafés, won first prize with a vegetarian version.

It caused an uproar!

“Bacon is an essential ingredient!” the townspeople raged. “Traditional dock pudding is intrinsically NOT vegetarian.”

With impeccable Hebden Bridge logic, Jetta argued that forty per cent of the town’s population was vegetarian. She maintained that if you wanted to keep old traditions alive, you had to move with the times.

Jetta kept her prize, although I found an unverified account that in 2017, the judges disqualified a vegan dock pudding…

Back at the cricket pitch, the groundsman asked us politely if we could move because the club had a match the following day.

We secured our belongings, then roared up the narrow lanes and along the balcony roads that lead out of town. From Mytholmroyd and Hebden Bridge centre, the only way is up.

On our way, we passed the distinctive stone terraces of weavers’ cottages that grace the lush green hillsides.

Ever the innovator, even before Hebden Bridge pioneered the notion of chakra alignment via the medium of shamanic chanting accompanied by a white witch strumming a ukelele, it embraced the concept of ‘flying freehold’. This legally grants Happy Valley residents the right to live on the ceiling!

With so little flat building land available in the steep-sided valley with its marshy floor, Hebden Bridge came up with a typically quirky solution. The town’s distinctive ‘Top and Bottom Houses’ are four or five-storey buildings, split horizontally. Facing in opposite directions, the two residences have street entrances at different levels. The Bottom House, which opens on to the lower street, owns the shared floor/ceiling outright, but a flying freehold gives the Top House the legal right to live on it!

And so, with our deflector bars duly shortened with a borrowed angle grinder, filled with appreciation for Hebden Bridge’s trailblazing tendencies, and in awe of the controversy that a vegan version of a vegetable delicacy made from stinging nettles could foment, we passed the town’s farewell sign.

Thanking careful drivers or wishing you a pleasant onward trip would never cut it in the planet’s fourth funkiest place.

In lettering to match the way markers on its 500-year-old bridge, the town’s boundary sign summed it all up.

‘That Was So Hebden Bridge.’