The happiest place in England! JANE FRYER visits the town with 50 pubs and restaurants, scones the size of your head… and an annual ferret race

When is the best time to visit Skipton, ‘Gateway to the Dales’ and England’s newly crowned epicentre of national happiness?

Perhaps on a bright summer’s day, with the narrow boats gleaming on the Leeds and Liverpool canal and otters bobbing.

Or on Sheep Day, in June, when the roads are closed, the town is ovine crazy and a chap called Julian Kaye makes a special Sheeptown gin – ‘We use water from the canal and chuck in a few botanicals’.

Or perhaps during the big Christmas lights switch on and Santa Run, when around a sixth of the town’s 15,500 population dress up in full Father Christmas outfits and run through the cobbled streets.

But instead, I visit on a cold, grey, wet week in February. Café windows are dripping with condensation and the market stalls – selling everything from cauliflowers to scones the size of your head and dog beds – are battened down against the drizzle. Flat caps are pulled down, hard. 

But George the fishmonger, who has been up since 1am and is now serving from his van, is roaring cheery greetings.

‘Good morning, Brian! Ow are you? Morning, Mary! Ow’s your mum? This is Rebecca, her parents are the local undertakers!’ he says, waving around a pink langoustine.

‘I’ve been doing this for 38 years, so I know ‘em all and they’re all lovely, lovely people. The very best. Of course they’re happy. They live here!’ 

And through the drizzle, he tells me how much he loves his job, how he used to work with his wife, until she fell one New Year’s Eve and broke her shoulder and now he works with his son-in-law Nikky – and that while they bicker gently, it’s better than it was working with his wife.

He tells me how 80 per cent of his fish comes from the Shetlands, via his cousin, who also supplies Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City football squad, because Pep doesn’t like farmed fish.

Donald Ripley, nearly 92 and out buying teacakes to share with his ‘darling wife Kathleen’, is equally perky. 

‘What’s good about Skipton? Everything! I’ve lived here all my life. Never wanted to live anywhere else – why would I?’ he says.

‘It’s the people. It’s always the people – though, like anywhere, you always get one or two baddies. And sometimes you get free beer at the Working Men’s Club, so that’s quite a bonus. So yes, I’m happy.’

So is Julian Kaye, of Sheeptown gin fame, who runs the brilliant Wright Wine and Whisky Co.

Julian tells me how he was one of the original sponsors of the Calendar Girls, members of the nearby Rylstone Women’s Institute group who, in 1999, famously stripped naked for charity with carefully placed spider plants and buns, and were later immortalised in a film starring Helen Mirren, Julie Walters and Celia Imrie. 

‘Ros, who ran a dress shop from what is now our whisky room, was Miss November!’ he says.

And Jem Darling, 22, who works in the Black Horse pub on the High Street, tells me they’ve been flat out today with a funeral.

‘Never seen so many people go through so much food. They were really going for it. Very jolly crowd. They had a great time.’

Gosh. It feels a bit like a parallel universe. 

And it is easy to see why the recent survey by property website Rightmove saw the pretty town of Skipton in North Yorkshire pipping the London boroughs of Richmond-upon-Thames and Camden, as well as Woodbridge in Suffolk and nearby arch happiness rivals, Harrogate.

‘We’ve come second to Harrogate before,’ says Joe Langley, of Hardisty estate agents. ‘But they’re different – flashier, more obvious money. There are a lot of full pockets here, but we don’t walk about in Gucci loafers.

‘This is proper Yorkshire, so you’ll always find someone to stand with and talk.’ 

Which is important, because the glory was not just for happiness and access to nature and green spaces – revealed this week in another survey as the key things families look for – but also the friendliness of the residents and access to essential services, such as schools and transport.

Skipton boasts a few rather less essential things, too.

These include the 900-year-old castle off the High Street, one of the best preserved medieval castles in the country. 

For centuries it was the seat of the Clifford family but since the 1950s has been home to the Fattorini family – Italian jewellers who, I am told proudly by at least five locals, made the original FA Cup trophy.

And there’s the teeny but exquisite museum – which was shortlisted in a national museum contest alongside the National Portrait Gallery and the Young V&A – which has a priceless Shakespeare first folio on display that was discovered in a backroom cupboard under a sink only a few years ago.

As Jenny in Kutters hair salon puts it: ‘Nowhere’s perfect, is it? But there’s a lot to go at here. And at least people are friendly.’

She’s right. Stand in the street looking lost and people will come running to help.

Pop into one of the town’s 50-odd (yes, really) pubs and restaurants on your own, and you’ll be surrounded by friendly faces in minutes, sharing stories about how world famous pie makers Stanforth’s lost their crown to rivals Farmhouse Fare (apparently there was a fallout when the business was sold and the seller took the recipe with him).

Or how tickets for the annual ferret race extravaganza (next Wednesday evening, in nearby Appletreewick) sell out in one minute flat – ‘It’s like Glastonbury!’ – and that some furry runners are perked with a little tot of whisky.

And, in Donald’s case, about the shocking thing that’s happened to teacakes these days.

‘They used to be twice the size. They’re going to be scones before we know it!’ he cries.

But most of all today, everyone’s discussing happiness. What it means. Why it matters.

‘You don’t have to be jumping about saying, I’m happy, I’m happy, clapping your hands,’ says Debbie Brooksbank behind the bar in the Boat House. ‘It’s about being content.’

‘It’s not about having money or cars or stuff,’ says Peter Lockwood, of boat hire company Pennine Cruisers. ‘Not for us.’

The town’s lovely mayor, Councillor Winston Feather, puts it differently: ‘I’m not always the happiest person, but I’m so, so grateful to live here.’

And there’s a lot to be grateful for.

Skipton has good schools – two grammars and an academy that has recently been turned around – sports teams, a lovely leisure centre, walking groups, book groups, bridge clubs, a market four days a week, an actual bank and post office (albeit in a branch of Subway), theatre and a cinema, where I’m told several times that the premiere of Calendar Girls took place the day before the one in Leicester Square.

Crime figures are also relatively low – a good thing given the police station is open for only four hours a day and officers have to schlep over from Harrogate. There aren’t even holding cells here any more.

So, every once in a while, the head honcho of North Yorkshire Police (who lives in Skipton), puts on his full regalia – ‘stars and stripes and everything’ – and walks through town. 

Just to show a police presence . . . on his day off. But before we think we’re in an episode of James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small which, naturally, was filmed nearby (‘Our good friend Andy the vet is the consultant hand that goes up the cow’s backside’ says Julian), it is important to remember that of course not everyone here is happy.

How could they be? There are always people having a bad time thanks to illness, grief, depression, poverty and loneliness.

Certainly, Jodie a hairdresser with pink-rinsed hair, seems to loathe it. ‘It’s not a happy place,’ she insists, crossly. 

‘My customers are always moaning – about everything from the world to the weather to the fact we have put our prices up from five pounds a cut to six – after five years!’

And Claire, 54, points out, quite rightly, that behind ‘all that bloody happiness’, the local food bank is in hot demand.

Another woman who doesn’t want to be named, whispers about a stabbing and even a murder, ‘only a few years back’. 

Also, while Skipton Building Society head office employs 900 people and there are good transport links to Leeds and Bradford, access to decent jobs is not as good as it could be, house prices are much higher than in any of the surrounding villages and so the young struggle a bit.

‘There’s a dark side to Skipton, like there is everywhere,’ says Debbie in the Boat House Bar. ‘A lot of youths smashing about in the bus station. I think there was even a glassing. They’re bored. No youth clubs. Not enough for them to do, like anywhere else.’

So I head to the bus station where today, happily, no one is smashing it up, and get chatting to Charlie who is 16 and studying business and waiting for a bus with his mates.

‘It’s all right here, I s’pose. There’s cafés and a cinema and somewhere to play football,’ he says. ‘But it’s quite boring. It can’t be the happiest place, surely? There’s got to be happier places than this!’

Okay, so, given a magic wand, what would he do? ‘Make the weather better,’ he says, without hesitation. ‘Or move to Monaco. Which sounds much nicer.’

Matt, meanwhile, who works in Bek’s Electrical shop and has lived here since his missus threw him out of their home in Castle Hill, is not a huge fan.

‘I wouldn’t die if I didn’t live here. My customers are a merry bunch, but prices are always rising. People keep going on about how bloody happy it is – but it’s all about visitors.’

Those visitors arrive by the coachload from spring onwards. But of course, they also bring their wallets, which is a good thing because there are a few empty shops dotted around.

And in the beautiful Holy Trinity Church, perched at the top of the High Street and dating back to the 12th century, the heating hasn’t worked for three years and the congregation have been cuddled up with hot water bottles and blankets.

Even the famous narrowboats have had a time of it, what with all the canals drying up. 

But now the hire companies have ditched holiday rentals and switched to day trips, with shiny boats called Bill and Ben, Jack and Jill and Wallace And Gromit.

‘It’s the end of an era,’ says Peter Lockwood. ‘But you’ve just got to get on with it, ‘aven’t you.’ 

Happily, the endless pubs, microbreweries and clubs are thriving – two more opened just this week.

Just don’t call it Little Ibiza, as some newspapers did last year when reports of the great nightlife here hit the Press.

‘We didn’t love that – that wasn’t really our thing,’ says Gerry, 54, eating a (Farmhouse Fare) pie on the bridge with her dog. 

‘We’re more about the chat here, really. We love to chat, about anything.’

Indeed. In the Castle Inn, Alison, 62, tells me that half the town is haunted – including my lovely hotel, The Woolly Sheep Inn. 

She insists there are secret tunnels, big enough for horses, running under the High Street and that she was at school with one of the Yorkshire Ripper’s early victims, who was three years older than her. 

‘Ooh, it was terrible. We weren’t allowed to walk around the town at all.’

Skipton is an extraordinary place. Not perfect, of course not. But it is warm, straightforward and so, so friendly – partly because people actually look at you rather than at their mobile phones as they walk about.

But the highlight is surely Skipton Sound Bar, a live music venue near the bus station with a special oldies afternoon on Wednesdays which, by 2.15pm, is rammed and booming with Northern Soul music.

‘You have to get here by two to get a seat,’ shouts Doreen, 84, looking gorgeous in a sparkly top and with a perfect blow dry.

‘My friend Joan’s coming on the bus from Ilkley Road and we usually stay till about nine and then go to a speakeasy round the corner afterwards, then a taxi home just to be safe!

‘Come and dance,’ she cries, and as she boogies off to groove with her pal Justine, it is impossible not to join in.

So, finally, what advice would they give to perk up the rest of us?

For Doreen, it’s: ‘Life’s too short to moan about the weather. Mind your own business, get out and enjoy yourself, have some fun.’

George the fishmonger says: ‘Just be content with what you’ve got. If you’ve got £100, don’t spend £110.’

But I think my favourite comes from Julian, who puts it like this: ‘I always say to my kids, “Your word’s your word and be nice”. If everyone lived by that, there wouldn’t be so much strife in the world, would there? Just be nice, it don’t take much.’