Home to just 4,500 people and set in a scenic, rural valley, this quaint market town has blossomed into a bastion of tolerance.

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Back in the 1970s, artists and activists were drawn here by cheap housing after the cotton mills shut down. "One historical and cultural factor [that helped establish a burgeoning lesbian community] may have been the separatist wing of 1960s and 1970s feminism," said Dr Andrew Moor, who teaches film studies at Manchester Metropolitan University. "There was an element which allied itself with alternative hippy culture's experiments in alternative living, communes and a resistance to full-throttle capitalism. Hebden was the right size and in the right place."

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