Northampton Audio Tour: Clicking, Closing and the Sound of the Town

Ahead of you stands a large red-brick factory block with polychrome brickwork, tall iron-window ranges, and a carved royal warrant set right on the corner. This is G-T Hawkins, or rather the great shell of it - one of the largest factories in the Mounts, built in stages from the eighteen eighties onward and now turned into apartments after decades standing empty. Look for the scale of the thing: the long ranges, the muscular brick piers, the sense that a whole city block got recruited into making boots. That is not accidental. Hawkins grew by swallowing neighbours, including the older Hornby and West works next door, until the firm occupied the entire block. George Thomas Hawkins started building here around eighteen eighty-five or eighteen eighty-six. In that same period he began making riding boots for Queen Victoria and earned the royal warrant you can still see carved into the fabric of the building. From there the business moved hard into military supply: Boer War boots, First World War aviation boots, Second World War flying boots for Mosquito and Spitfire crews, and army boots again in the Falklands conflict of nineteen eighty-two. Northampton factories had a habit of turning local skill into imperial logistics. There’s a useful detail on the facade if you can spot it: a taking-in door, used to hoist hides and materials up into the building from carts below. And that gives us another missing link in the chain. Before the clicker ever laid brass patterns on leather, tanners cured the raw hide and curriers dressed and finished it for use. The currier is the quiet first link, easy to forget because no one writes songs about surface treatment. Nearby firms such as James Collier and Company at the Globe Leather Works handled that stage. Then the leather came here, into the four-step chain you already know. Inside a place like Hawkins, hierarchy was built into the floors. Clickers at the top, usually men and usually the best paid, decided how to cut around flaws in the hide. Closing rooms, full of women machine-stitching uppers, worked longer hours for less money. Lower down, lasting and finishing drove the leather toward a saleable boot. It was skilled work throughout, but not equally rewarded. Funny how industry can count every minute except the unfair ones. And Hawkins comes with a local misconception worth clearing up. People often say Hillary and Tenzing wore Hawkins boots on the nineteen fifty-three Everest summit push. They did not. S-A-T-R-A designed those final high-altitude boots, and Harry Bradley with Ron Skillman supervised just thirty-five hand-made pairs in Kettering. Hawkins later sold a commercial Everest boot and certainly benefited from the glow, which is good marketing if not quite the same as standing on top of the world. Still, the firm did make serious specialist footwear - including rope-soled boots for early tank crews, where metal hobnails could have sparked in fuel vapour. That sort of practical invention is very Northampton: not flashy, just life-saving. Hawkins closed in nineteen ninety-five. The smell of glue drifted down Overstone Road almost to the end. Then silence for nearly thirty years, until restoration turned the works into Hawkins Court in twenty twenty-four. A factory can lose its machines and keep its authority. This one still does. Next we’ll see a place where production never really stopped. Walk to Tricker’s Factory, fifty-six to sixty St Michael’s Road; it’s about three minutes.

On your right, look for the long red-brick frontage with pale glazed brick across the lower face, tall regular windows, and the Royal Warrant plaque worked into the front. This is Tricker’s, founded in eighteen twenty-nine by Joseph Tricker and still trading - the oldest continuously operating shoemaker in England. The factory here opened in nineteen oh four, and the glazed-brick frontage you can see today comes from a nineteen thirty-seven rebuild. It is one of the clearest surviving links between Northampton’s old craft world and its modern premium shoe trade, because the work never really left. Around a hundred people still make shoes here. If Hawkins showed you the scale of industrial production, Tricker’s shows you the technical idea that let Northampton keep quality as the market changed: the Goodyear welt. This is the first time we need the term. In a Goodyear-welted shoe, the upper and insole are stitched to a strip of leather called the welt, and then the sole is stitched to that welt, rather than simply glued on. The result is strong, repairable, and capable of being resoled again and again. In other words, it’s expensive up front and stubbornly long-lived - rather like some Northampton opinions. Tricker’s own history is very specific here. Walter James Barltrop, Joseph Tricker’s son-in-law, went to New York around the turn of the twentieth century, bought the machine technology, and brought Goodyear welting into the factory. That moment matters. The parlour trade had already been weakened by the machine age, but this did not kill craft. It redirected it. Every pair still moved through the traditional sequence under one roof: cut, closed, lasted, stitched, finished. Same old chain, just under factory discipline and with better machinery. Look at the windows and the building’s height. Factories like this were designed around light. Top floors gave clickers the clearest view of the hide; lower levels carried the weight and vibration of making and finishing. Inside, Tricker’s staff still talk about the place as a living factory - whirring, hammering, laughing, stretching. One wonderfully Northampton detail: in the closing room they have used an industrial tea urn as a humidifier, boiling away to keep the leather pliable. In this town even the tea equipment ends up in production. There’s a cautionary note, though. Some sources claim Tricker’s made the Everest summit boots in nineteen fifty-three. That story gets repeated a lot, but the cleaner evidence points elsewhere, to S-A-T-R-A’s custom expedition work in Kettering. What Tricker’s indisputably did do was survive, adapt, and stay rooted here while almost everyone else either closed, merged or moved. It received a Royal Warrant in nineteen eighty-nine, renewed by King Charles the Third in twenty twenty-four. In twenty twenty-five the Barltrop family sold a controlling stake for the first time in nearly two centuries, though they remain involved. Even Northampton continuity, it seems, now travels with paperwork. And yes - if the place feels familiar, that’s because the factory served as a key location for Kinky Boots. Not fantasy, then. The real rooms were photogenic enough. From here we move to the other surviving giant of central Northampton shoemaking. Walk to Crockett and Jones at Perry Street and Magee Street; it’s about eight minutes.

Ahead of you rises a broad red-brick factory frontage with continuous bands of large-paned windows, a stone frieze reading Crockett and Jones, and a corner presence that fills the street. Crockett and Jones began in eighteen seventy-nine with two brothers-in-law, James Crockett and Charles Jones, each backed by an interest-free loan of one hundred pounds from the Sir Thomas White Trust. That trust dates all the way back to the sixteen hundreds in Northampton and further in idea to fifteen forty-two - a scheme to help young tradesmen of good character set themselves up. So this famous shoemaking firm started, quite literally, on a local leg-up. Not venture capital. More like civic faith with a repayment schedule. The company first worked in Exeter Road with about twenty employees, still using the hybrid system we’ve already met: leather cut centrally, then sent out to home workers, then returned for assembly. In eighteen ninety-one the firm moved here. What you see is a building layered over decades. Charles Dorman designed the earliest block in eighteen eighty-nine to eighteen ninety. Alexander Anderson added to it in eighteen ninety-six. Then Brown and Mayor produced the big nineteen ten extension, probably Northampton’s first steel-framed building, using vertical strips of glazing almost like north-light sheds turned upright to throw daylight deep onto the work floors. Finally F. H. Allen added the nineteen thirty-five Perry Street office block. This place was built to keep workers close. The company chose to expand on the same site rather than move away and lose its trained labour, because many employees lived only a few doors off in Perry Street and Turner Street. That local geography matters. A shoe factory is not just a building; it’s a daily orbit of homes, shops, pubs and bodies arriving on time. Nick Jones, a fifth-generation family member, has talked about standing on the balcony above the shoe room since childhood and not wanting this to go. You can hear both pride and mild alarm in that sentence. Fair enough. It has outlived most of its peers. Inside, around two hundred and fifty people still carry each pair through more than two hundred operations over roughly eight weeks, almost all in Goodyear welted construction. During the First World War this same site became a war machine, making over six hundred thousand pairs in a single year and more than one million over the course of the conflict. That wartime surge also came with private loss: Clifden Crockett, youngest son of founder James Crockett, died in action in nineteen sixteen at Pozières Ridge. Percy Jones returned and served the company for sixty-seven years. Northampton history is full of those pairings - mass production and one family’s grief sharing the same ledger page. In the late twentieth century Jonathan Jones helped save the firm by pushing toward export markets and higher-end shoes. That strategy held. The company won the Queen’s Award for Export Achievement in nineteen ninety and later a Royal Warrant in twenty seventeen. Today many people know Crockett and Jones through James Bond, with several models made here for Daniel Craig’s films. Secret agent footwear from Perry Street - proof that espionage, too, depends on decent welted soles. This is one of the last central factories where Northampton’s premium trade still feels ordinary and alive rather than embalmed. But the turning point that made all this possible came from one address we’ve been circling for a while. Walk to Campbell Square, Northampton; it’s about seven minutes.

Ahead of you, look for the plain multi-storey brick block at the corner with a hard industrial shape and little ornament, set into the square like a practical argument. This is Campbell Square, and this building is the argument. In eighteen fifty-seven Isaac Campbell and Company put up what local memory called the monster warehouse - widely taken as Northampton’s first proper indoor boot and shoe factory. Not just a bigger workshop. A deliberate break with the old order, stocked with the new closing machines that threatened the parlour trade. The reaction was immediate. This was the building that helped trigger the anti-machinery strike we met back at Lower Mounts. The Mutual Protection Society warned that either the machines went, or the workers did. The workers lost. Manufacturers sent orders to Leicester, the strike cracked, and the factory model stayed put. Then the scale shot up. Four years later Turner Brothers took over, and by eighteen sixty-five they were producing one hundred thousand pairs a week here using steam power. That is the moment the old outwork town stopped merely fearing the future and found it standing in brick in front of it. Campbell Square is short on romance and long on consequences. Next stop: where Northampton spent the wages after the work was done. Walk to the Roadmender nightclub; it’s about eight minutes.

Ahead of you stands a modest brick chapel with round-headed windows, a simple gabled front, and an old dissenting plainness that almost hides its importance. Castle Hill Chapel, now United Reformed, dates from sixteen ninety-five and is one of the earliest surviving Nonconformist chapels in England. Philip Doddridge arrived here in seventeen twenty-nine and stayed until seventeen fifty-one. His congregation, by contemporary recollection, was composed mostly of humble shoemakers, many barely literate when they came. Doddridge taught them theology and reading together. That matters because literacy changes what a trade can become. A town of cordwainers who can read, argue, organize and write petitions does not stay quiet for long. The radical line we’ve already traced - the Mutual Protection Society, Bradlaugh’s support, James Gribble later on - grows from soil like this. And there is William Carey: journeyman shoemaker, later missionary scholar, baptized in the Nene near here in seventeen eighty-three. A man who started at the bench and ended up translating scripture into dozens of languages. Northampton did occasionally overachieve. This chapel planted ideas as surely as the factories made boots. Next we head to the parish church where the trade kept its rituals. All Saints’ Church is about four minutes away.