Conservation Area: Kettering conservation area (DNN12319)

Kettering remains an attractive and cohesive town with its town centre buildings and street pattern reflecting their medieval, market town origin, dominated by the medieval Parish Church of St Peter and St Paul, and with suburbs still little altered from their creation in the nineteenth century when Kettering rapidly expanded, particularly in connection with its thriving shoe industries. Reminders of this are all around, whether it be the former shoe factories in the suburbs, the rows of nearby artisan housing, or the more lavish residential areas laid out for wealthy managers and factory owners. This boom time is marked also in the handsome town schools and community facilities of the time – the churches and chapels, parish rooms and cooperative society shops and stores – and most famously in the later Wickstead Park of 1921. It was the era of the great business families of Kettering such as the Timpson’s and Gotch’s of shoe fame and Toller, leading solicitors. Kettering was the birthplace of the Independent Baptist Missionary Society, no mere accident of history given the fervour of non conformity in the borough in the nineteenth century – with several local evangelical figures including William Carey, missionary; William Knibb, missionary and emancipator (responsible for the liberation of some 300,000 slaves) and Andrew Fuller, Baptist minister. Sites or buildings connected with all three figures remain in Kettering together with a rich variety of churches and chapels. There is a surprisingly rich stream of artists and architects connected with the town: John Alfred Gotch, leading architect and president of the RIBA and his brother Thomas Cooper Gotch a leading artist, both sons of the Gotch shoe family. Above all looms Alfred East, metaphorically and physically. He was an important artist nationally of the late nineteenth century, knighted in 1901 and his gift of a gallery (with paintings) still graces the centre of the town, a memorial both to him and an important era of civic pride. ASSESSMENT OF SPECIAL INTEREST The nineteenth century development of the town centre – with several buildings by interesting and nationally important, locally based architects, is complemented by suburbs of the same date including several high quality residential areas with leafy roads and villas, as well as significant areas of terraced housing to a much higher density but of no lesser interest. These areas, with their surviving industrial and community buildings, are especially significant because of their completeness and because of their distinctive localised regional details – with stone dressings and decorative embellishments and frequent use of the motif of three linked doors in a common frontage (two doors as house entrances, one door for yard access). These are the types of neighbourhoods which in other industrial towns and cities have been greatly altered or eroded with demolition and new unsympathetic construction. But here at Kettering whole late Victorian neighbourhoods remain intact with seemingly only superficial twentieth century alterations. The Northamptonshire Extensive Urban Survey: Kettering notes that even beyond the designated Conservation area “The survival of the urban topography of the process of late 19th century urbanisation is exceptionally good and there are areas to the north east of the town that are of national significance requiring direct conservation action to ensure the survival of their distinctive character representative of a key phrase and industry in the urbanisation of Northamptonshire in the modern period”. Significant also are two distinctive building types: firstly the late nineteenth century former shoe factories, never more than four storeys high and rarely more than say ten bays in length with regular patterns of windows – sometimes round headed – a much more domestic scale of industrial building than say the traditional cotton and woollen mills of the north or the engineering factories of the west midlands. Altogether the factories in Kettering are much more integrated into their streetscape without the barriers offered by mill yards, detached office/engine room buildings or mill reservoirs found elsewhere. Secondly Kettering exhibits quite distinctive school buildings – owing to their late building date and the decision to use these to act as landmark beacons in the Kettering townscape with several designed on key sites with splendid lofty towers.

Record last edited

Oct 1 2009 1:02PM