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.
