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.
