The future of the shoe repair craft in Dublin is under existential threat. How are the city’s cobblers adapting to their ever-changing environment?
There is something transportive about the smell of a cobbler’s shop. The particular mix of leathers and glues and overheating machines is one of those specific scents that is rooted in a time and place. For me at least, it carries with it the still potent fear of those hammer-wielding model cobblers in the window (the rigid up-and-down motion is reminiscent of Psycho’s shower scene), as well as even more intense memories of the high stakes excitement of my mother’s emergency high heel surgeries.
“Oh people come in all the time and just…” Isaac Jackman stands still and takes a deep inhale. He laughs his breath back out, wide-eyed explaining that people come in just for a smell of the place. “They’ll say ‘I’m here to get my shoes done but do you mind if I stand another minute?” he explains, looking around at his crammed shop in Charlemont Street that barely has room for two customers, let alone a lingering sniffer. Shoes seem to spill out of cracks in the wall. “They’re not mad, there’s something psychological about smells, and it actually transports them back in time to being a kid getting shoes repaired with their parents,” he says. “I can see it – their face changing, they’re mind changing, it’s taking them back.”
But for all of these memories, cobblers are fast becoming a forgotten breed. He tells me about a twenty-something who walked into the shop a few months ago and asked “what do you do?” Jackman told the inquisitor that he repaired shoes and was a cobbler, only for the young man to reply that he had “never heard that word before.”
“That’s how disjointed we are. It’s sad thinking that there are people who actually just don’t even know you exist – it’s no wonder we’re at this point.”
By “this point,” he is referring to the fact that there are less than thirty cobblers left in Ireland. Where there used to be “one on every street, like a pub,” they are now downsizing to smaller locations or expanding their services to provide dry cleaning and key cutting and other kinds of repairs in order to supplement the ever-changing landscape of our shoe habits.
“The race to the bottom has begun,” says James Brennan of Tara Street Leathers – a shop now located in a smaller premises on Talbot Street due to the dwindling office worker footfall. A customer comes in to collect a pair of brogues that had to be re-soled. Once a regular, he now only works in town once a week and admits that he needs less of his leather shoes and, thus, Brennan’s service. He puts on his newly repaired shoes, taking off the well-worn pair he came in with, before somewhat impulsively handing them over to Brennan to fix too. “Sure while I’m here,” he says with an eye-roll.
Over the last fifty years, the footwear industry has changed drastically. It is estimated that approximately 24 billion pairs of shoes are produced annually around the world and with mass manufacturing, new materials and cheap imports becoming the order of the day, footwear and textile products generally have become increasingly disposable. Notably, the plastics and rubbers now used in a lot of shoes have made them more and more difficult to repair – not to mention cheaper to buy – putting the cobbling trade in an existential spot. “They’re not designed to be repaired. How do you get around that?”, asks Brennan.
Over on Pembroke Street, Carl Roche of Just for Kicks has found his own way. Based on the premises since 2014 as a dry cleaners, he conversely came to shoe repairs as a way to keep his business afloat during Covid. “I just hit this at the right time,” he says, contradicting the logical experience of most cobblers during the pandemic.
“I wouldn’t consider myself a cobbler, but you could maybe call me a modern-day cobbler”, he explains bashfully of his work with more contemporary trainers. “People weren’t wearing suits and shirts anymore, sure, but they also weren’t wearing brogues,” he says, gesturing outside to the offices on Baggot St and Fitzwilliam Square where a lot of his business comes from. He points to an empty rail that “would have been literally packed from wall to wall with shirts,” illustrating what he means when says “there’s no way I would have survived on the amount of dry cleaning we were getting.” Behind the empty rail is a shelf full of shoe paints and polishes.
He started out painting and cleaning shoes, giving them a spruce up where they needed it and over time taught himself more traditional techniques of the trade, experimenting with applying it to more modern designs. “This probably seems a bit Mickey Mouse to other more traditional set ups!” he jokes.
He is likely referring to something along the lines of the Italian Heel Bar just off South Anne Street on Anne’s Lane, where leather goods seem to hang from the ceiling. “We definitely focus on more expensive shoes here,” owner Kevin Brennan explains. “But we’ve had to change with the times,” his co-owner Carl Bonnie jumps in. “If you don’t change with the times, you won’t last.”
Brennan’s father first opened the shop on a bigger premises on South Anne Street back in 1965, Bonnie completed his apprenticeship there. The two took over the business together after Brennan’s dad passed away in the 1990s. Over the years, the pair have dealt with every manner of shoe, from politicians’ brogues coming in from Kildare St to drag queens’ boots coming in from Georges St.
“It’s certainly an interesting way to meet Dublin,” Brennan says. Inherent to the job, they both agree, is adaptability. No two customers are the same, let alone their shoes. “Sure I’ve even had people bring in odd shoes without noticing,” he laughs. “More yet bring only in one and I have to break it to them that we really only do pairs.”
Not only are they up against people’s idiosyncrasies (to put it kindly), but they are also constantly challenged by the uniqueness of each pair of shoes. “The nature of what we do is adaptation,” says William Clegg of Clegg’s Shoe Repairs in Rathmines. “A factory makes this type of shoe and they have a production line that does everything the same way,” he says, pointing down to a loafer he is whirring on the sanding machine. “Whereas we get every type of thing coming in,” he continues, “and sometimes it’s a little beyond or just outside your field but you have a set of skills already, you have a set of machinery that you can put to use, and you just have to re-arrange it to respond to what you’re given.” There is no getting stuck in your ways in this repair work – it demands agility and is, at its core, about change.
Understandably, this makes it a complicated trade to pass onto the next generation of cobblers, if they even exist. It takes a huge amount of time to learn not only the craft but also the mindset it requires, and few are coming up the ranks as it stands.
None of the shops I visit have a clear line of succession going forward. Roche at Just for Kicks jokes that “it will probably die with me,” given that neither of his children have any interest in joining him and he is struggling to find anyone willing to do the messy training. “That’s probably why it’s a dying trade too – few want to put the work in and few of us want to share our secrets with someone who could leave,” he explains.
Roche was surprised to discover that there was “nowhere to go and learn how to do this” when he first embarked on his own cobbling journey. There is no mention of cobbling on the CAO form for post-secondary courses and despite the best efforts of Isaac Jackman in particular, there is no government-supported apprenticeship programme nor any acknowledgment of the craft by the Heritage Council of Ireland (which has assisted thatchers and dry stone wall creators in being recognised by UNESCO as part of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity).
In this sense, the notion of a dying trade is a complicated one. “It’s not as if the demand isn’t there,” says Brennan at the Italian Heel Bar. “People aren’t getting replaced when they retire because there’s not that many incentives for younger people to go into it. Sure why would you?”
Clegg struggles to answer this question himself, although he admits that he is a man down in the shop, making it a hard day to be optimistic. “It’s just a lot of jobs in one job, you have to have quite a diverse range of skills,” he explains. “I don’t know what other job market you could dip into and say ‘hey you guys, you’d be good at this!’ because whatever they’re doing, it probably pays a lot better than whatever we’re doing.” Working on at least twenty pairs of shoes a day while getting interrupted by tens of people coming into the shop to drop the next pair in, many of these cobblers find themselves both busy and unsure of how to keep the doors open on their own.
As we are talking, a customer arrives at Clegg’s to collect a pair of seemingly non-descript white trainers. “Those shoes are worth twelve-hundred euros,” Clegg shakes his head after he is gone. “They have no branding visible so he must be proper rich,” he jokes. I wonder what else you can tell about customers by their shoes? “People keep their neuroses in their feet,” he admits. He hesitates before offering up the example of “guys who want to be taller”. He grimaces. “Should I be telling you that?”
When it comes to secrets in shoes, such neuroses pale by comparison to the strange requests that have crossed the threshold of the Italian Heel Bar. “Someone died, right”, Bonnie launches in, “and he had this pair of shoes and they wanted the soles polished so that when he was in the coffin and his feet were sticking out, they were shiny like a new pair.” How did he respond? “Ah, sure I said no problem,” he shrugs back. “I even offered to put the dates on the inside!”
Evidently, these cobblers are seeing people and their shoes right through their lives. This is particularly true of Brennan at the Italian Heel Bar, as well as Clegg and Jackman – they each grew up around the trade and took over their respective businesses from their fathers.
“It’s a sweet thing and I appreciate that,” Clegg says of sharing the same craft with five generations of Cleggs before him, not to mention the fact that he is working in the very same shop that his grandfather did. It does, however, add another layer of pressure to an already precarious existence. “One of the many reasons I haven’t gone and done something else that I’m interested in is that this place was entrusted to me and I’m a custodian of it – it would be a shame for it to close with so few left,” he says. “It’s nice to try to keep these old things”, he explains, “but I also think we’re still relevant.”
It’s a question that lingers over all of these conversations, regarding both the business side of things and the shoes themselves: what’s the use in keeping an old thing going? Keeping an old thing for the sake of its oldness would of course be a futile endeavour. But cobbling is no exercise in nostalgia. The “dying trade” label hangs over these shoe repairers but it belies the fact that the craft is as useful now as it was at any other point in time, if not more so.
Though the mass production of poor quality shoes has, in many ways, undermined the trade, a growing sense of individual responsibility in responding to the climate crisis has conversely become its saving grace. “That’s a light which we didn’t have before, that there are people wanting to try to save their shoes in terms of doing their bit for the environment,” Jackman explains. “Toxic shoes are very hard to recycle and it’s one of the hardest industries to deal with. We can actually help with that if we have the right support to survive ourselves.”
Environmentalists talk about the “principle of sufficiency” – a strategy to live within our planetary boundaries when it comes to both consumption and waste. It hinges on the notion of “enoughness” and challenges people to abandon modern ideas of progress that equate it with growth, and embrace it as some kind of redress between our needs and wants, and the planet’s limits.
For the last fifty years, better has meant bigger, has meant more, has meant new. But at this critical juncture, we need to find ways to go back, to return, to remember how our own parents and grandparents used to relate to material things, to all this stuff that we now accumulate at an exponential rate. And maybe shoes could be the starting point.
“People have a love affair with shoes,” Jackman shrugs with the blasé demeanour of, well, a cobbler. “It could be a pair from Penneys or some Manolo Blahniks, I have had people in here begging me to save every kind of shoe.” Comfort is of course the most significant, if functional, factor in saving a pair of shoes, but he has also found people to have more meaningful reasons for looking after the soles that they or their loved ones have clomped around life in. Over time, he says, they become intertwined with personal histories, memories, a particular moment or even a person.
It is a prominent idea in environmental studies that sustainability, in the broadest sense, is all about time. Andreas Malm writes in The Progress of this Storm that “every impact of climate change is a communication with a human past” and, in turn, an unprecedented, material connection to the future. Old shoes seem to capture this idea, filled as they are with both memories as well as the literal intention to keep taking steps forward.
People bring shoes into these cobblers that they got married in, that their late parents left them, or that they want to pass on to their own children. “You don’t always ask for those stories,” says Brennan at the Italian Heel Bar. “Yeah but you get told them anyways,” quips Bonnie.
For these cobblers, there is nothing sentimental about keeping old things – it is entirely forward-facing. There is a sense of resolve amongst those still trading that there is still life in the craft yet. “There will always be an element of it there,” Brennan says. “It might have to move into lanes off lanes,” he shrugs, gesturing to the smaller space his business has downsized to, “but it will always be useful.” Bonnie points out that the Italian Heel Bar has people of all ages coming in. “You see parents with their kids coming in and then their kids coming in as adults.”
Clegg is similarly uncomplicated about its future: “So long as we’re walking on concrete streets and not green grass, we ‘re going to be wearing shoes.”
Deteriorating shoes are seen by these cobblers for their potential, comfortably sitting in their workspace somewhere between the no longer and the not yet. These shops feel like time capsules in some ways, filled to the brim with all of these evocative soles and stories and smells, and are reminiscent of a vanishing past when we had a sense of so-called “enoughness”. In other ways though, they feel more like a possible future – one in which we do something between remembering and forgetting, something that feels like paying attention.
Words: Molly Furey
Photographs – Susan Quin
