Forget stocks and shares, the history of the City is all about shoes

Thursday 03 July 2025 5:55 am
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Wednesday 02 July 2025 7:23 pm

Overlook shares and shares, the Sq. Mile has an illustrious historical past stuffed with footwear that deserves celebrating, writes Anna Moloney

Patrick Cox was the it shoe designer for Nineteen Nineties fashionistas. When Victoria Beckham obtained her first paycheck from the Spice Ladies, it was to his London store she ran, queueing up outdoors on a Saturday afternoon together with her sister to nab a pair of his iconic white slingbacks – aptly known as the Wannabes. However as his star rose, so did it fall, along with his eponymous model – and his psychological well being – collapsing within the mid-noughties. Since then, with the assistance of  psychedelic remedy, he’s relocated to Ibiza, the place he now runs his new shoe model Doorways of Notion, a “consciousness-raising” clothes line, “ethically sourced, sustainably produced, and embroidered with love proper right here on Ibiza”.

So to search out him among the many lah di da corridors of Saddlers’ Corridor, a stately constructing stood within the coronary heart of London’s monetary district, earlier this month was, it’s truthful to say, a bit of off-brand.

However Cox, like many London shoemakers, owes a lot of his legacy to the Sq. Mile, or, extra particularly, the Cordwainers, one of many oldest livery firms within the Metropolis whose legacy lives on with shocking vitality and glamour at present – counting the likes not solely of Cox, however of Jimmy Choo, Sophia Webster and Stuart Weitzman amongst its ranks. Not names you’d essentially affiliate with the Sq. Mile. “Wow, the Cordwainers are older than my nation,” American Weitzman exclaimed when changing into a liveryman.

Certainly, simply down Watling Avenue, within the coronary heart of the monetary district, is a statue – not of a banker, however a shoemaker. Solid in bronze, The Cordwainer reveals the craftsman laborious at work, forehead furrowed and arms strained, as he makes a pair of leather-based boots. Beneath his stool, the inscription proudly proclaims: You’re within the Ward of Cordwainer.

It occurs to be nestled proper the place the punters of The Wren Tavern collect, amongst whom virtually the whole thing of Metropolis AM’s newsroom counts itself on a Thursday evening, but I’d by no means seen it earlier than Penny Graham, clerk of the Worshipful Firm of Cordwainers, instructed me about it. 

Courting again to 1272, the Cordwainers existed primarily to carry out a regulatory operate, giving its stamp of approval to high quality footwear in London, whereas additionally guaranteeing the legacy of the craft by means of coaching apprentices and supporting its members and their households by means of ailing well being or widowhood. And naturally, type was vital too: the defining characteristic of all liveries was literal – a superb outfit you would put on to indicate off the standing of your craftsmanship. 

Nearly 800 years on, albeit with its regulatory operate shed, the Cordwainers – and far of the regalia – survives at present as a champion of the shoe trade, not least by means of its help for shoemaking faculties such because the London Faculty of Vogue’s, beforehand often called the Cordwainers’ Technical Faculty the place Cox himself studied, and for which the Worshipful Firm now throws an annual prizegiving bash to rejoice the subsequent technology of Cordwainers. And it’s this, the Cordwainers’ annual Footwear Award, that lured Cox, clad in a suitably irreverent open-toe pair of his personal Doorways of Notion sandals (a bit of like Birkenstocks however with gold eyes for buckles), again to the Metropolis this month.

The annual ceremony provides prizes to college students to permit them to pursue the craft, whereas additionally permitting them to community with legends of the trade and – in fact – exhibit their footwear.  “Don’t even strive,” was Graham’s sage costume code recommendation forward of the ceremony. At this yr’s awards, it was Jimmy Choo being commemorated because the recipient of the corporate’s Award for Excellence, collected by his daughter, and I met one girl in reception (a buddy of Choo’s) who was fortunate sufficient to boast a wardrobe of 43 pairs, many bespoke.

Cox might have admitted that Cordwainers Faculty, the place the shoe designer says he spent way more time partying than finding out, was “not the happiest time of [his] life”, however he is aware of it is a vital a part of the legacy of shoemakers. 

Having mellowed from his time in Ibiza, Cox says he got here to the ceremony as a approach to give again to his group – together with some sage recommendation. “Actually take into account if you wish to use your title – dropping your title means greater than dropping your organization,” he cautioned throughout his speech, together with what felt like a salient tip to “by no means signal a private assure”.

For the subsequent technology of shoemakers and shoe designers, such warning might be much more vital, with shoemaking now on the heritage craft endangered record. With it now less expensive to fabricate on mass and overseas, it doesn’t take an excessive amount of deduction to determine why, however the Cordwainers are adamant the craft is vital.

Requested why we should always even trouble caring about defending it, Graham is existential: “If we lose these crafts, we’ll by no means get them again since you lose the flexibility to show them. Maybe they’re by no means going to be big, however it’s a really, very lovely talent.” Deborah Carre, the bespoke shoemaker behind Oxo Tower-headquartered Carreducker, can also be emphatic on the significance of the talent for the entire trade. “It’s a dwelling heritage… the craft of hand shoemaking informs the processes inside manufacturing… it’s not the preservation of the craft, it’s an evolution of the craft”.

On the Cordwainers Awards, the place footwear on exhibit ranged from horned trainers to collapsible heels to two-footed footwear, such evolution was actually on show.