Trouble at mill

I have some sympathy with the pioneering incomers who moved to the Yorkshire mill town of Hebden Bridge in the 1970s. At the time Hebden was in a near terminal decline, its factories closing in rapid succession. As a result, the town suffered one of the fastest depopulations ever seen in Britain, as the more animated locals left to find work elsewhere. The incomers, called ‘offcomers’ locally, sought to reverse this with a strong dose of middle-class culture, although being for the most part liberal Guardian readers they would probably baulk at the idea they ever sought to engineer working-class Hebden into something more bourgeois.

Nonetheless, that is what they did, and it worked. Today Hebden is as much an advertisement for the power of art and culture for social regeneration as the later examples of Hoxton, Liverpool or Gateshead. The
problem for the incomers is that despite the obvious benefits of having shops, schools and an astonishing cultural life for a town its size, the natives of Hebden Bridge don’t seem to like it.