Listed Building: Dalkeith Works (1391023)

Boot and shoe factory. 1873, extended in a similar style by 1884. For Abbot and Bird. Orange-red brick with stone ashlar dressings. C20 concrete tile hipped roofs with deep eaves supported on shaped stone eaves brackets. Italianate style. 3 storeys with 2-storey and single storey elements on right end. Main range has 17-window front of cast-iron framed windows with round-arched heads to ground and first floors and segmental above. Raised storey bands and quoins. Doorways in slightly projecting 2-and 3-window elements to centre and far right (the latter the pre-1884 extension). The right end has the 2-storey element of 2 windows over doorway in moulded stone surround and small window, and a single-storey 3 windows and doorway element. Rear walling has brick window heads. HISTORY. This factory was built for Abbot and Bird in 1873 and they are noted as still operating here until c.1914 when it was bought by James Partridge, a shoe mercer and manufacturer. By 1924 it had become a printing works. SOURCES. EH Northamptonshire Boot and Shoe Survey, Site Report No. 51. Morrison, Kathryn A., with Bond, Ann, ‘Built to Last? The Boot and Shoe Buildings of Northamptonshire’, forthcoming, pp. 12-14. This well-detailed factory was one of the earliest large boot and shoe factories in Kettering and was built in the Italianate style, the fashionable one for factories in the town, no doubt recalling the splendid Manfield factory in Northampton of 1957 (demolished 1982). This example is one of the earliest and most impressive boot and shoe factories to survive and it retains its fine external appearance.

Record last edited

May 26 2022 12:50PM