It’s opening time at the Fox and Goose and the customers are practically queuing outside. Once the doors open, a local writers’ group assembles in a room adjacent to the bar. One regular customer shuffles in using a wheeled walker.
“Your usual, Bill?” shouts Andrew Brown, the pub’s cellar manager.
“Aye, lad,” he replies.
A foaming pint of Pictish Brewers Gold from over the border in Rochdale is placed on the table. Two green-fingered women nip downstairs out of the rain for a quick drink after tending to the pub’s terraced garden.
All this, and not a dead body or police line in sight.
For the Fox and Goose is in Hebden Bridge, the West Yorkshire town that’s the setting for the popular BBC television drama series “Happy Valley.” Now also an international success, the third and final series reached its climactic finale earlier this year. Visitors come from all over the world, even joining “Happy Valley” guided tours around the town. Hannah Firman, manager of the Fox and Goose, says that trade is boosted by the tourists seeking out filming locations, especially on weekends. Many are just a stone’s throw from the pub.
Sally Wainwright, the show’s creator, comes from the nearby town of Sowerby Bridge. She has said that a large part of its success is its setting, a “very particular part of the world”—Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire.
About three hours to the north from London by train, the town has a geography that plays a huge part in this unique sense of place. It lies in the Calder Valley, a dramatic gorge that cuts through the South Pennine hills that form the backbone of northern England. The fictional home of the series’ lead character, Sgt. Catherine Cawood, is one of Hebden Bridge’s distinctive, ramrod-straight, stone-terraced houses that crowd onto the valley floor. On the hillsides, two-story homes are stacked above each other in vertical flights, clinging vertiginously to the steep slopes. It all creates a physical feeling of close community. The town’s distinctive architecture is featured in the branding of the local brewery Nightjar.
Rainwater funnels down tempestuous streams in deep-sided valleys from hills, known locally as “the tops,” that sit high above the town. This waterpower brought early industrialization, with woolen mills and factories served by the eighteenth-century Rochdale Canal and George Stephenson’s first trans-Pennine railway in the 1840s.
The easier expansion of nearby cities Leeds, Manchester, and Bradford led to economic decline in the 20th century. Encouraged by cheap housing and workspaces and the valley’s sense of off-grid seclusion, people pursuing alternative, creative, and environmentally conscious lifestyles moved in. In combination with the phlegmatic Yorkshire natives, a unique Hebden Bridge community culture developed, with main shopping streets composed almost exclusively of independent businesses.
It’s a town of dualities—traditional yet alternative, industrial architecture in spectacular countryside, an independent, self-contained community that’s within commuting distance of some of England’s biggest cities.
And where artists move in, brewers and bar owners aren’t far behind. Hebden Bridge is home to one of the U.K.’s best-known craft brewers—Vocation—and hosts an almost criminally large number of pubs and craft beer bars for its less than 5,000 inhabitants. Like “Happy Valley,” have they been shaped by Hebden Bridge’s unique sense of community?
At the Fox and Goose, Firman certainly thinks so. Speaking in the pub’s cozy and rustic art room, she notes that this particular pub is actually owned by the people it serves.
“When the previous landlady was no longer able to run the pub, the community got together, put out a share offer and bought the building,” she says. “Our business model isn’t about making money. It’s about sustainability. We hire local staff, pay them the real living wage, and have a massive group of volunteers that come to help.”
The Fox and Goose is the current local Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) Pub of the Year, with a policy of supporting small, independent, local breweries. Most of the six hand pumps are from Yorkshire producers. Brown serves me a fine, refreshing pint of Deception, a pale ale from Abbeydale Brewery in Sheffield. Only Durham Brewery’s Mona has racked up more than 30 beer miles.
“Our business model isn’t about making money. It’s about sustainability. We hire local staff, pay them the real living wage, and have a massive group of volunteers that come to help.”
With its rambling layout of small, connecting rooms lined with old photos, wooden benches called “settles” lining the walls, and wonky bar tables, the Fox and Goose feels like the antithesis of the corporate chain pub. On the wall, a piece of paper invites customers to write “What does the Fox and Goose mean to you?” Firman summarizes the responses: “Camaraderie, acceptance, and making everybody feel welcome.”
It must be working. On my visit, a rainy Monday quiz night, the pub is so packed I share a table with a keen quiz team of strangers. The next day I’m stopped in the street by a vaguely familiar looking team member, who thanks me for suggesting a correct answer.
Both Little Valley and Vocation breweries are found on the tops, in a business park at the edge of open moorland. It’s an isolated, windblown place, originally home to a chicken and pig farm. Surrounded by traditional stone walls housing weather-beaten sheep, it overlooks deep, wooded valleys below. At 700 feet above sea level, it’s reached from the valley via the winding road along Cragg Vale. Said to be England’s longest continuous hill ascent, it is such a grueling climb that it formed part of Stage 2 of the Tour de France when the race launched its 2014 Grand Départ in Yorkshire.
Undaunted by the gradient, Wim van der Spek, head brewer at Little Valley, cycled up the hill every working day for fifteen years from his then-home in the center of Hebden Bridge, less than a couple of minutes’ walk from Sgt. Catherine Cawood’s fictional terraced home. Recently, however, he moved to the tops with his partner, Sue Cooper, the brewery’s co-owner. For Cooper, the tops don’t have the same atmosphere as the valley.
“You could just be in a different world,” she says. “The two are very different—connected but different.”
The story of van der Spek and Cooper’s relationship and their setting up of Little Valley might be thought exotic in most places, but perhaps not in Hebden Bridge. It all started in 1999, Cooper explains.
“Wim and I met each other in Kathmandu, and then later, by complete coincidence, in Rajasthan,” she says. “Wim had cycled there from his native Netherlands, and I decided to cycle back overland all the way back home to northeast England, but he had to leave to start a job in Germany, where he also qualified as a brewer.”
The two settled down in Britain, where van der Spek first worked as head brewer at the similarly remote and windswept Black Isle brewery near Inverness, Scotland. In 2005, van der Spek and Cooper set up Little Valley with an eye on sustainability and the environment, two issues that are important to many residents of Hebden Bridge.
Throughout the brewery’s eighteen-year history, they’ve maintained a commitment to producing vegan beers and hold organic certifications for all but a few of the beers they brew. Cooper says that Radical Roots, Little Valley’s ginger Pale Ale, is the only Fairtrade-certified beer produced in the U.K.
“It’s a very quirky valley.”
Another beer, Withens Pale, takes its name from the nearby reservoir that supplies the brewery with water that is significantly softer than what is used by most U.K. breweries. The area’s copious rainwater filters through ancient blanket peat bogs that carpet the moorland setting of Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights”—an internationally important, unspoiled natural habitat that sequesters carbon from the atmosphere. In the glass, the beer is an appropriately light peat color, with a floral, hoppy aroma reminiscent of a fresh spring day on the moors.
Van der Spek’s experience brewing in Germany convinced him that the area’s soft water would be particularly suitable for Golden Ales, such as Little Valley’s bestselling Tod’s Blonde, named after the nearby town of Todmorden. “That style of beer and the characteristics of the water work really well together,” he says. “It’s just perfect.”
On the other end of the flavor spectrum, van der Spek used his experience working in the Low Countries to research and brew a bottled Dubbel in collaboration with a Benedictine abbey in Yorkshire. Called Ampleforth Abbey Beer, it’s complex with dark malt, vine fruit, and chocolate notes.
The brewery produces cask ale for distribution to pubs in the local area, although most of its production is destined for its in-house bottling line, in both filtered and bottle-conditioned styles.
Cooper believes the brewery is a reflection of Hebden Bridge’s unique culture.
“It’s a very quirky valley,” she says. “Belgian, Dutch, and German influences are intertwined in everything we’ve done.”
While Little Valley still occupies the industrial unit where it was originally founded, its younger neighbor Vocation has expanded into more of the business park’s buildings. Vocation’s supplies of Yorkshire barley, New World hops, and occasional batches of fruit arrive in the loading bay just across from Little Valley.
From the brewery’s inception in 2015, Vocation focused on hops, especially Citra, Mosaic, and Simcoe, with its first four beers—Pride & Joy, Bread & Butter, Heart & Soul, and Life & Death—still forming the heart of the range that is brewed today. Names featuring two contrasting or complementary words, paired by an ampersand, are carried by other Vocation beers. While apparently unintentional, that might subconsciously reflect Hebden Bridge’s character of dualities and contrasts.
An early U.K. craft adopter of canning, Vocation quickly found itself sought out by large supermarkets hoping for a slice of the burgeoning craft scene. A rapid expansion saw the brewery grow to its current volume of 55,000 barrels per year. It remains independently owned and now brews around the clock, from first thing on Monday morning to late on Friday night, with six brews every 24 hours. Fermentation is completely closed, with automated cleaning and yeast management. The squat buildings of the business park were a tough fit for the tall fermenting and conditioning tanks, so most of them were ultimately moved outside. But the reduced profile of the former farm buildings allowed Vocation to expand in an area of stark natural beauty, unlike the light industrial units often used by modern microbreweries.
The highest spot on the brewery site is the steel deck that services the outside tanks. From here, you can see vistas of unspoiled, treeless peat moorland flecked with heather and bracken while skylarks flit across the skies above. The only man-made structure visible outside the business park is Stoodley Pike, a 19th-century hilltop monument to victory in the Napoleonic Wars, which broods over the Calder Valley.
The big, open skies can be gloriously sunny: Last summer, the brewery was able to supply power for the whole business park, when weather permitted, from the solar panels on two of its buildings. Further installations will allow the brewery to be completely self-sufficient in terms of energy.
Matt Howgate, Vocation’s brewing director, says the setting makes it an attractive place to work, even helping to attract staff from Portugal and South Korea. The brewery’s contemporary branding, however, means the typical Vocation drinker is unlikely to realize the beer is made in such a picturesque spot.
It could be argued that Vocation continues the area’s centuries-old tradition of setting industrial production in natural beauty. But that location has brought some challenges.
“We’ve had some interesting days with cranes,” Howgate says.
While the weather can be harsh in winter at the exposed site, the brewery has learned to cope. “I’ve been here for five years,” he says. “We’ve probably stopped production for two days during that time, usually down to snow that’s coming really quickly.” He was fortunate to miss the major storm in 2018 that brought in eight-foot snowdrifts, he says.
The brewery’s top-selling beer, Life & Death, is an IPA generously hopped with American Citra and Mosaic. To my mind, underneath the tropical-fruit top notes, it possesses an underlying soft, almost dank vegetal character, conjuring up the deep wooded valleys of the landscape below.
Though primarily known for supermarket-friendly craft styles, Vocation harbors a secret: a voluminous, pitch-dark warehouse stacked with hundreds of wooden barrels. Maturing in wood, Howgate says, is how Vocation’s brewers express their creativity.
“It’s a different side of the business that we really want to focus on,” he says. “There’s a huge variety of barrels: Scotch whisky, bourbon, maple syrup, white and red wine— Chardonnay and Pinot Noir.”
Fruit and novel ingredients are occasionally added before the beers go into the barrel. Recent examples include a coconut porter and a Szechuan-inspired Stout with pink peppercorns, ginger, and chili. These beers are brewed to be aged, with flavors that are rounded and mellowed by the inherited characteristics of the barrel’s previous contents. Most of these barrel-aged beers are bottled and sold in small quantities.
Gary Farlow, the technical brewer, gives me a tasting of his favorites, including the 11% ABV Barrel-Aged Cherry Kirsch Stout. It’s a real Heathcliff of a beer, unfolding on the palate with marvelously complex cherry, chocolate, and licorice flavors and a satisfying umami undertone.
Howgate concurs with van der Spek’s praise for the local water.
“It’s fantastic for brewing, as we’re not restricted to any one style,” he says. “We’ve also commissioned a borehole, which goes down nearly three-hundred feet, that we plan to use for all our supply soon.” That low-mineral water is ideal for the brewery’s Helles-style Hebden Lager. Unlike the house-style assertive hop character, it’s clean and crisp, with German Hallertau providing balance, rather than leading on flavor.
While the smaller Little Valley operates a brewery shop on site, Vocation has a bar in town, Vocation & Co., with other branches in the nearby northern cities of Halifax, Manchester, and Sheffield. Recently expanded, the Hebden Bridge bar reflects modern craft culture as much as the Fox and Goose venerates the traditional pub. A row of 20 keg taps on the back wall dispenses the likes of Wham-A-Geddon and Neon Fog.
However, the bar also has four prominent hand pumps for cask ale. It’s an important side of Vocation that many customers might not know about, according to managing director Rick Stenson.
“The brewery is producing more cask than ever; it’s just that our canned sales have increased faster,” he says. “British cask beer is completely unique. It’s the perfect way to showcase our hops.”
Vocation & Co. is managed by Robin Hallet, who moved to Hebden Bridge from London just for the job. Being close to the railway station, the bar attracts many weekend visitors on the “Happy Valley” trail, including a surprising number from overseas. “Around spring break time, we suddenly notice a lot of Americans around,” he says.
During filming, the bar often fed and watered workers from the show. “The crew would call and ask us to fix up something for them and turn up thirty minutes later with all their equipment,” Hallet remembers. Off-duty brewery staff, he says, usually go for the light straw-coloured Bread & Butter. With a modest 3.9% ABV and a tight head from the use of a sparkler, it’s perhaps a modern update on the refreshing, creamy Yorkshire style of pint, as exemplified by those brewed in Tetley’s now-demolished brewery in Leeds.
Like many venues here, the bar works to maintain strong links with the local community, including supporting Happy Valley Pride, an event that reflects how Hebden Bridge has long fostered a large and thriving LGBTQ+ community. In addition, the brewery supplies a mobile bar in a converted Land Rover for local events like the annual rubber duck race on Hebden Water, the river that runs through the town.
“British cask beer is completely unique. It’s the perfect way to showcase our hops.”
In addition to its many traditional pubs, the town is also home to some truly idiosyncratic bars, such as Drink, a quirky micropub that specializes in mead. Many of these local venues collaborate to support Hebden Bridge Craft Beer Festival every April, with tap takeovers, events, and live music.
Strolling through town late on a warm summer Sunday evening, thoughts of such busy events slip far from my mind. The laid-back atmosphere feels far away from the plots of crime drama, although in this community of sharp contrasts, that might be exactly the town’s and TV series’ appeal? I stop by the Picture House—a typically nonprofit cinema operated by the local council—where I find Nightjar Brew Co.’s eponymous bar. I sample a pint of Lost in Ikea, Nightjar’s DDH Session NEIPA, while a healthy crowd of drinkers of all ages relaxes in the bare-bricked, softly lit ambience.
Here in Hebden Bridge, it seems they’re living in a very happy valley indeed.
Words by Michael ClarkePhotos by Sean McEmerson
