– Marsden
– Hebden Bridge
– Ripponden

No idea on the later but I’d mucho have Marsden over Hebden for what your criteria is.

Marsden’s pretty ace, mostly. Friendly community organising fun stuff like the Jazz Festival and that, nice little village centre so you can shop local, good pubs and restaurants and cafes, some pretty good riding on the doorstep, good links to Manchester and not too far off the motorway if you need to drive for work.

We have some problems caused by a small disruptive element of the weekend Ale Trail. The trains are pretty much no-go on weekend afternoons now if you have kids, they’re not a nice place to be at all. The middle of the village feels a bit like a city centre evening on Saturdays, with middle-aged blokes pissing and vomiting in the street, abusing the locals and generally being noisy annoying gits. The police have started taking things seriously now, so hopefully the scrattier hen and stag dos will **** off back to Blackpool next year. Having said that it’s only really a problem if you live between the village centre and the station, the rest of the village is largely unaffected.

If you’ve got kids you should also know that the local secondary school is a bit shite. We’re considering a move elsewhere in the next few years because of this.

hen and stag dos

are you serious? No seriously, it smacks me as some sort of alternative universe- what you describe!!

Weird.

I can only remember one bit of trouble in Marsden and thats when that father murdered his family.

are you serious?

Yep. It’s all the fault of that James May and Oz Clarke booze program apparently, they featured the Real Ale Trail (Stalybridge-Batley pub crawl by train) and it went completely mental after that. Most of the people who’ve showed up since then don’t have the slightest interest in real ale, they just want to get smashed on the cheap, and given that Northern Rail don’t even check tickets on the trains, they basically get a free ride to pay local prices for as much beer as they can pour down their necks. By the time they get to us in the middle of the line, they’re completely shitfaced. Come over on a sunny Saturday afternoon next year and have a look, it’s pretty grim.

We also had a stabbing earlier this year, some random punter in a pub pissed off a local scumbag and ended up dead. Nasty, but not related to the Ale Trail as far as I know.

Come to Marsden, it’s lovely! 😉

@hora – wasn’t that in slaithwaite?

@mintimperial – The beer train thing is pretty bad now. I’ve done it a couple of times in the past when it was quite quiet, went to do it again this summer and sacked it off pretty quickly and went back to the grove in hudds instead.

Crackers- you think of ale crawl and you think of people like ourselves pretending to be young again and really just being a bit jovial. Even Stalyvegas was never bad!

Slaithwaite – yes (Corrected).

You go to the Grove in Hudds? I often pop in up the road to see my Mum when I stop off for a Curry takeaway on Thurs nights. I might pop in if its still good? The last time I went (couple of years ago) the landlady made a big fuss of our Westie (and he ended up sat on a stool at the bar!).

The Grove is still great and that will have been Kelly making a fuss of your westie.
I don’t get in quite as much as i used to, but it’s still def worth a trip.
If you like your beer I’d highly recommend HDM (Hand Drawn Monkey) beer shop which is a great little bottle bar next to Discovery Bay run by folks who really know their stuff. http://www.hdmbeershop.co.uk/the-shop/ they aren’t open every night though

Even Stalyvegas was never bad!

I think that’s because Stalyvegas knows how to deal with it, whereas it’s pretty new to Marsden and the authorities basically didn’t know it was becoming a problem. Like I say they seem to be taking it seriously now so hopefully it’ll calm down over the next year or so.

A couple of my best mates are coppers and trust me they are taking the beer train issues very seriously all along the route as they’re all a bit hacked off with having to deal with it.
The day i tried to do it my mate was on duty covering it for the first time, but wasn’t aware of how messy it would be even at 3pm.
He gave us the nod to go elsewhere and pointed out that an inspector was running the show in marsden that day.

That daft thing is that Marsden is a great place aside from this one issue

http://www.hdmbeershop.co.uk/the-shop/

Great! another local business to support

I already visit the coffee shop down the road 🙂