Garnett Street Holiday Home occupies the beautifully restored upper floors of a Victorian building in the heart of Hebden Bridge. In this steep-sided Pennine valley, a single building often fronts two streets at once: below, a shopfront opens onto Market Street; above, reached by its own entrance on Garnett Street, sits the home. It echoes the town's celebrated over-and-under form (the "top-and-bottom" logic born of the hillside), where one plot yields two streets and two front doors.

The street below has always been a place of trade. A few doors along, a listed row built around 1870 still shows the sewing workshops on its upper floors, and a small blue plaque marks where John Greenwood, a fustian cutter, lived in 1916. The blue plaques are one of a series across town recording the ordinary weavers, cutters and shopkeepers who filled these streets when Hebden Bridge was the centre of the corduroy and moleskin trade, the place they called "Trouser Town." That industry boomed once the Rochdale Canal arrived in 1798 and the railway followed in 1841, threading goods and people along the valley floor.

Trade still happens beneath your feet: the ground floor is home to Valley Organics, a workers' co-operative grocer that has stocked local and organic produce on this street since 2001, carrying on a Hebden Bridge co-operative tradition the town became nationally known for. It's a fitting neighbour for a place that reinvented itself from post-industrial decline into one of the north's most independent, creative small towns.

In 2019 we took on the upper floors and restored them top to bottom, giving the old house a new front door on Garnett Street, and a new chapter as a place to stay.