It seems the obvious thing to write about is first impressions of the place, and I will come to that but to live in the now for a brief period I am a little worried about Hebden Bridge at the moment. I speak from a drinker’s point of view and we currently have three of our taverns under temporary licences and one that has closed after a brief period of opening under the same system. From talking to landlords round and about it doesn’t look like the situation is rosy for most of the ale houses out there due to the toxic mixture of high alcohol taxation, a stagnating (perhaps soon to be stagflating) economy and the dreaded beer tie which strips landlords and ladies of their freedom and independence to run the pubs they wish to run. Hillaire Belloc said “Change your hearts or you will lose your Inns and you will deserve to have lost them. But when you have lost your Inns drown your empty selves, for you will have lost the last of England.” Good old Belloc was a bit politically unstable but he knew the value of a good pint! All melodrama aside he is right about this. Think back to your most memorable adult evenings or days, at some stage the majority of them probably contain a pub or two, at very least a drink in some way. Perhaps that says more about us as a nation than it does about the socio-economic factors of alcohol consumption but speak it does and prior to that death rattle of the local pub, one day it will be your local pub, we will have to have tried something. One of the worst things about my hometown of Leeds was the faceless, empty husks of pubs in to which people poured themselves of a weekend to experience “vertical drinking” and listen to similarly faceless music. Everything has its place in a varied cultural landscape, yes, even dubstep! Not every pub can be a wine bar, not every wine bar can be a restaurant and not every drinking establishment can or should be the same and this is the real danger. Homogeneity is a killer. It killed the high street in most towns and cities and now it is doing the same to the pubs, particularly of the rural variety Since 2005 more than 6,000 pubs have closed nationwide, most of them out of town pubs like the ones in and around Hebden. Some of them even have blue plaques on the buildings reminding forlorn regulars that “the legendary Horse and Crown once stood on this site where such and such king received refuge after the battle of wherever”, like some barbaric epitaph to corporate folly. This is what large pub companies want to happen, they want everyone to have to travel to large town centres to drink. The more residences they can close down and sell off the bigger their profits are. A landlord’s first responsibility should be to his drinkers, and probably himself but now, via pub companies these unfortunate souls have a responsibility to shareholders, stakeholders, CEOs, directors, partnerships etc etc ad infinitum.
The reason I open with that is because the pubs were the best attraction for me when I first came here for a lazy weekend back in 2007. I think I slightly missed out on the true glory days when Holmfirth handed over the mantle of “hippie heaven” to the young, vibrant Hebden but in 2007 it was still something special. It was something special to see a pile of Guardian newspapers stacked to chest height in the newsagents instead of the ubiquitous Daily Mail everywhere else. It was special to find Hoegaarden on tap in a number of the bars as well as ales in every single one. It was special to see a small town with two butchers, a few florists, any number of independent clothes shops and fair trade options wherever you looked. It was special to see an inordinate number of people smiling and children being polite (mostly). It was special to hear a row going on late at night and realising it wasn’t about who spilled whose pint but rather whether Trotsky’s ultimate point was correct in his History of the Russian Revolution. It was special to go for a walk and see llama’s, alpaca’s and emu’s without the assistance of any illegal substances. I’ve no need to speak in past tense because most of these things are still there and they’re still special. I still feel my problems fall from me and down the hill as I trudge the well worn lanes in to the town centre. I still feel held and enveloped in arms of the ancient Pennine sisters wherever I am in the valley. The nearer I get to what is now home on the train, the more at ease I feel with myself. I started this entry on a negative note since, as I said I fear for Hebden in the same way it pleases me to see Todmorden and Sowerby Bridge being touched by the “right-on” kinda vibe. There are plenty of vested interested who would love to get a piece of this relatively wealthy area and turn it in to something none of us would want to see, and it’s not just the Lancastrians, no. One of the problems is the wealth in the neighbourhood. Some people who have arrived here have brought their sterilising attitude to the rough, raw edginess of our little society. The “squeezed middle” looking for a place in the country have seen something they like in the Calder Valley but it isn’t perhaps always the things we like and the things we have cultivated. You hear these attitudes every now and then as you go around town “I wish the Tesco was a bit nearer” is one statement I hear frequently that makes me shudder or “look at that, two women holding hands” as though they’d just seen Ken Dodd molesting a traffic warden. Our job, my friends, is to keep what we have, improve it where necessary and pass it on to the next bunch of hopers and no-hopers who rock up and find this oasis of peace and serenity in the middle of industrial England. This place that somehow cleanses with its dirt and inspires dreams in those who long ago lost the will to dream.
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