SNN110738 - Westfield Road, Wellingborough, Northamptonshire: Historic Building Record, 2017

In May 2017 Cotswold Archaeology was commissioned by CgMs Consulting to undertake a Historic Building Survey of the former boot and shoe factory on Westfield Road, Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, to satisfy a planning condition in advance of demolition. The results of the building recording and analysis, to Level 3 of Historic England’s guidance, are included in this report. The factory is an example of an early 20th-century boot and shoe factory built for the Co-Operative Wholesale Society in 1922. From 1940 the building was used by the CWS for corset-manufacturing, thence passing into new ownership for the manufacture of dolls in 1966. Doll manufacture continued until c. 1978. During the early 1980s the building was again used for footwear production by Lattaway, this continuing until the late 1980s when Astraseal and Graham Holmes Plastics, producing replacement windows, occupied the building until c. 1992. The building was unoccupied from 1992-1994, and Geo. J. Cox Ltd produced shoes from 1994-2007. The building has been empty since then. The factory is an early 20th-century example of a boot and shoe factory, built at a time when few new factory complexes for the industry were being constructed. Whilst the building provides a spatial context for understanding the activities of the boot and shoe manufacturing industry, its internal evidential value is slight, with very little evidence of the earliest phase of boot and shoe manufacturing, and little to no evidence relating to the later use of the factory for corset and doll manufacturing. It is also evident that the building underwent a series of modest alterations as its function, and production processes were changed, despite which the original building’s extent and spatial context remain intelligible. Although of interest as an example of a later boot and shoe factory, the building is considered to be of limited architectural and historic value as it now survives, with other more notable examples of 20th-century boot and shoes factories designated as Listed Buildings following the summary report on The Northamptonshire Boot and Shoe Industry produced by English Heritage, in 2000. The significance of the former factory at 46 Westfield Road has been appropriately recorded, and no further survey is recommended prior to demolition.