Hebden Bridge Arts Festival

[Shirl]

I'm posting this here because it would get missed in the Northern forum. I was just looking at what's on locally this month as saw this list of artists in Hebden showing their work in their studios. It struck me that there are a massive number of artists and crafts people for such a small town.
Anyone coming to visit during the arts festival?

http://www.hbopenstudios.org.uk/2012/Gallery.html

 

[mrs quoad]

It struck me that there are a massive number of artists and crafts people for such a small town.

Didn't Norman Tebbitt or Bernard Ingham make an infamous comment about bongo-playing lesbians infesting the parks, thereby creating a self-fulfilling prophecy premised only on a pre-existing nugget of truth?

 

[Shirl]

Didn't Norman Tebbitt or Bernard Ingham make an infamous comment about bongo-playing lesbians infesting the parks, thereby creating a self-fulfilling prophecy premised only on a pre-existing nugget of truth?

Not sure but Bernard Ingham always has plenty to say about Hebden. The lesbians these days tend to be professionals although there's no shortage of bongo players on Windsor Road or Glastonbury Street as we called it when we first moved here

 

[mrs quoad]

In one of his recent columns Sir Bernard Ingham fulminates against lesbians, liberals and — bizarrely — trees. He propagates the idea that Hebden Bridge has become the ‘Lesbian Capital of Great Britain’. This label, he suggests, does not say much for the men of Hebden Bridge. In a few ill-chosen words of jaw-dropping crassness, he manages the neat trick of insulting just about everyone in town. Is he really subscribing to the notion that lesbians can be ‘cured’ by a good seeing-to? On his next visit to Hebden Bridge I suggest he wears a cricket box.

...

Sir Bernard recalls wistfully what life was like ‘BL’ (Before Lesbians). There are many people in this vibrant little town — original inhabitants and off-cumdens alike — who see things rather differently, and relish life ‘AI’… After Ingham.

http://www.hebdenbridge.co.uk/features/sideways.html

 

[mrs quoad]

Not long ago, Sir Bernard Ingham famously complained that his Yorkshire home town, Hebden Bridge, had become the "Lesbian Capital of Great Britain".

Unwittingly, he had pinpointed one reason why the former mill town is today the unhappy epicentre of a property boom. Thirty years ago, long after Mrs Thatcher's press secretary had forsaken his Pennine roots for Whitehall and a south London suburban house, Hebden Bridge was dying. Its factories, set up a century before on the precipitous banks of the Calder to harness the power of the rushing water, were closed. Its title as the world centre for the manufacture of working men's trousers had been stolen by cheap foreign versions of its fustian and corduroy cloth.

As its inhabitants sought work elsewhere, property prices imploded. Whole terraces of empty, back-to-back, stone-built houses were demolished.

And it was then that the lesbians arrived - amid a whole array of alternative lifestyle folk who ranged from artists, writers and musicians to New Age activists and Green campaigners.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/3334222/Where-theres-brown-rice-theres-brass.html

"Lesbian capital of Great Britain" was, perhaps, the phrase I was thinking of.
e2a:

Demography

Hebden Bridge has attracted artists, and has developed a small New Age community. It became attractive in the 1980s and 1990s to lesbians as a place of mutual support to bring up children.[7] As of 2004 Hebden Bridge had the highest number of lesbians per head in the UK.

In April 2005 Hebden Bridge was declared the 4th quirkiest place in the world by highlife (the British Airways flight magazine) and was described as "modern and stylish in an unconventional and stylish way".[9]

Bloody hell, they collect some odd statistics