Ahead of you the street climbs through a corridor of brick civic buildings and older terraces, with the slope itself and the dense side streets marking the edge of Northampton’s old industrial quarter.
This is the gateway to the Boot and Shoe Quarter, and it matters because Northampton still has an extraordinary amount of it left. Around these streets - Lower Mounts, the Racecourse edge, Abington Square, Billing Road - roughly seventy percent of the surviving boot and shoe industry buildings still stand. That density is why the council created the conservation area in twenty eleven. The hope, as planning officer Jenny Ballinger put it, was to do for Northampton what Birmingham did for its Jewellery Quarter: stop a working district from being quietly shaved away.
Two centuries ago, the Mounts were fields. Then, between about eighteen forty and eighteen eighty, they filled up at speed with factories, leather works, terraces, chapels, clubs and pubs. Walk any side street nearby and the trade still reads clearly in the architecture. Three-storey workshop blocks sit hard against the pavement. Long top-floor windows flood daylight onto the rooms where the most light-hungry work happened - clicking and closing. Lower down came the heavier processes, where machinery and weight could sit safely on stronger floors. It’s a very practical kind of urban poetry.
And this is the place to make one important correction to the neat factory story. Factories did not wipe out the old outwork system overnight. They lived side by side for decades. Even after the first major factory arrived, old residents still remembered houses in streets like Lower Harding, St Crispin and Compton where three or four people worked in one room, often in foul air, by tallow candle at night. Northampton held on to the parlour trade longer than almost any rival town. Modern industry arrived here, yes, but it had to squeeze in beside the old habits rather than bulldoze them at once.
It also helps to understand what machine changed the balance. From the late eighteen fifties, Singer-style lockstitch sewing machines entered the trade. Because Singer rented machines, a closer could have one in a front room instead of only in a factory. That sounds almost democratic until you remember wages. The cutting had already been centralized in town; the stitched uppers now moved increasingly into women’s hands on machines, often for long piecework hours and roughly half the pay of men in the clicking room. Progress can be surprisingly selective in who it benefits.
In November eighteen fifty-seven, local shoemakers proposed a strike against these closing machines. Their line was blunt: either the machines went, or the workers did. The Mutual Protection Society formally constituted itself in April eighteen fifty-eight and called the strike. Manufacturers answered by sending orders to Leicester. By mid-May, Northampton’s men had to concede. The machines stayed; Leicester grew stronger; and the quarter ahead of you filled with the buildings of a new industrial order.
There are other layers here too. The old Borough Gaol once stood on this general civic site, Mounts Baths opened nearby in nineteen thirty-six like an Art Deco temple to public health, and the fire station was placed here because dense shoe factories had an awkward habit of burning. But for us, this slope is the hinge in the story: from market and parlour into factory town. Just ahead, one of the big names in Northampton boots makes that shift visible in brick. Walk to the G-T Hawkins Factory at Overstone Road and St Michael’s Road; it’s about five minutes.
