PICTURED: ROBERT WILLIS AND ANTHONY BUNN.
Jermyn Street’s Open Door Series will be honouring the brands and businesses that make our street the home of gentleman’s style, and the pinnacle of British craftsmanship, by spotlighting your favourite brands, and the people behind them, as we get ready to invite you through our doors once more!
Edward Green’s footwear has been the go-to for British gentlemen for over a century. The man himself started working in footwear, as an apprentice, at the tender age of twelve. He began as a ‘clicker’, the person who cuts the leather to make the shoe, aptly named for the noise the cutting knife makes on the wooden base block as it slices through the leather. This repetitive apprentice work gave him the tangible skills of the industry, but it was his passion to create a better class of shoe that drove him to establish his Northamptonshire workshop in 1890 to do just that.
Edward Green promised his customers ‘Excellence without Compromise’, and the brand continues to fulfil that promise to this day. Mr Green started the company by hand-selecting the best craftsman for every stage of the shoemaking operation, and the workshop in Northamptonshire is still populated by the same standard of craftsman, using much the same time-honed techniques to create stunning heritage footwear.
Today the workshop produces 350 pairs of shoes a week, a small number in comparison to their nearby shoemaking compatriots. This is because each pair of Edward Green shoes goes through a meticulous creation process before they are ready for sale, with elements of the shoes still cut by hand, in similar fashion to the apprentice Edward Green’s shoe clicking all those years ago. The brand strongly believes that the quality of the shoe starts with its components and, consequently, they use the finest Italian and French calf-skin, which is then hand-finished to create their signature antiqued patina. The level of care that goes into each individual pair of shoes makes for incredibly long-lasting footwear, especially coupled with their iconic Goodyear welted soles, resulting in luxuriously characterful shoes for life. Edward Green has gained many faithful fans over the years, including Ernest Hemmingway and The Duke of Windsor, and they continue to supply the modern gentleman with an array of footwear and accessories that is as they say “fit for Kings”.