The Boot and Shoe Trades in London and Paris in the Long Eighteenth Century

Newgate Street in London for the "storage of Northampton-made footwear
intended for sale and export".87
The complex interrelation between London and Northampton can also be
seen in the setting up of partnerships involving production and retailing in both
London and Northampton. This was part of a different entrepreneurial strategy,
marketing high quality products in the provinces. If on the one hand cheap
provincial shoes were required in the London market, on the other hand high-
class shoes (normally prerogative of metropolitan production) had a market in
the rest of Britain. Numerous advertisements by country shopkeepers about their
recent visits to London explain the importance attached to the metropolis in
reassuring customers about the value of their purchases. Even when manufacture
was done locally, the London connection was deemed to be important. Olding
Butler, a Colchester shoe warehouseman, advertised in 1814 that "in
consequence of the disappointments that he has frequently met with by not
obtaining shoes from London, either in time or to order, he has engaged several
excellent workmen from London". 88 London fashion, if too expensive to be
imported, could be manufactured locally. Even more interesting, provincial
production could be sold either locally or to other parts of the country claiming
that it was London made. 89 There was also a more profound reason associated
with changes in the product. Northampton or other provincial producers could be
successful in the metropolitan market only if they had a clear idea of how
products and fashion was changing. This is an important subject if we consider
both the end of military (and fairly standardised) orders and the changes in shoe
fashion of the first half of the nineteenth century. Northampton not only
approached more directly the London market, but seemed to create a wider base
of production with a more diversified range of products. Only a mutual
collaboration between a Northampton and a London business would have
allowed such development.
One such case is the partnership between two brothers, John Denton Penn and
Edwin Penn: the first had a shop in Northampton and the second in Fleet Street
NPL, 'Articles of agreement between shoemakers in the County of Northampton in order to
establish a warehouse or depot in London' (1818) - Ms not catalogued.
88 Cit. in P. Sharpe, 'Dc-industrialization and re-industrialization: women's employment and
the changing of Colchester, 1700-1850', Urban History, XXI - 1(1994), p.91.
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