If you want to test the happiness of a place, you should go there on the most depressing day of the calendar year — which is, statistically speaking, the third Monday in January.
On Blue Monday 2009, shares in the Royal Bank of Scotland fell by 67%, and billions were wiped off the stock market. On Blue Monday 2025, Reuben Amorim gave a press conference in which he conceded that his team were “the worst team maybe in the history of Manchester United”. And on Blue Monday 2026, I am in Skipton.
There are many myths of modern England. Among them is the idea that it’s grim up north. As with all myths, this is a lie spun out from a grain of truth. It’s colder up north. It’s poorer. It’s less connected. Its countryside is washed with a miasma of grey mist. It rains, near constantly.
All these things are true, and yet in a corner of Yorkshire lies a pocket of land supposedly happier than everywhere else. By a large margin.
Skipton, a small market town home to 15,000 souls, lies on the edge of the rolling Dales. It boasts a modest number of famous citizens: one of the founders of Marks & Spencer, the poet Blake Morrison, the magician Mark Waddington, and Elaine Glover from Footballers’ Wives. It has a community football club, Skipton Town AFC, and a 900-year-old castle, remarkably preserved. Its largest employer is a building society, though it has always elected Conservative MPs. Every June, it hosts “Sheep Day”, a kind of ovine gala and funfair, free for all who attend.
Skipton has won “happiest place in Britain” just once, this year. Before that, it was always the bridesmaid: it came runner-up in 2020, and last year it was sixth. And yet clearly it's on the up, in terms of wellbeing. As on the up as it can be in a country that continues to drop in the “World Happiness Ranking”. Low life satisfaction is reported more often, particularly among younger generations, who are increasingly less happy than their predecessors — as well as more anxious and more skint. If “Broken Britain” defined the early 2000s, a more resigned and morose “Shattered Britain” ideology has replaced it.
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