20-26, St Michaels Road

725/0/10052 ST MICHAEL'S ROAD 20-26

GV II Double boot and shoe factory, now other commercial uses. c.1890. Red brick with blue brick plinth and stone lintels and sills. Slate roof. 3 storeys and basement.Plan of a pair of 'semi-detached' factories with central fire wall projecting above the roof line. 3-storey wings to rear projecting back from gable ends and various infill extensions. Front to St.Michael's Road has a 10-window range at first floor of wooden mullion and transom windows with small panes, the window to far left now a taking-in door. Similar windows above and below with taking-in doors with cranes to far left and right on second floor and entrance doors on ground floor. Further entrance door to centre left. Basement windows have cast-iron frames. Prominent eaves, coped gables including the central wall above the roof line and gable end truncated stacks on the front roof slope. Gable ends are blank and rear has various doors and casements, some large. HISTORY. 2 firms of shoe manufacturers are noted as being here in 1896, Beale and Co. at No.24 and Wheeler, Hull and Co. at Nos.20 and 22. This together with the mirror-image front and central dividing wall strongly suggest the initial construction as a double factory. The site is named as the Unicorn works in 1899, 1905, and 1912, and in 1916 Beale and Co. are noted as being at the Unicorn Boot Works, so it may have been unified by then. In 1928 the buildings were vacant and by 1937 were a printers and a woollen warehouse, no doubt reflecting the beginning of the decline in the industry from the 1920's onwards. SOURCES. EH Northamptonshire Boot and Shoe Survey, Site Report No.46. Morrison, Kathryn A., with Bond, Ann, 'Built to Last? The Boot and Shoe Buildings of Northamptonshire', forthcoming, pp.4 and 14. Menuge, Adam, 'Technology and Tradition: the English Heritage Survey of the Northamptonshire boot and shoe industry', TICCIH2000 Congress Papers. pp.106-7.

This works is a little-altered unusual survival of the 'double factory'. These were spec-built and where a regular plot, as here, permitted, designed like semis. As well of special interest in itself the works forms part of the most significant group of buildings of the boot and shoe industry in Northampton, the centre of the industry, including the former G. T. Hawkins factory opposite (q.v.) and the Trickers factory (q.v.) further down St.Michael's Road.