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.
