Liberty Shoes (Leicester, England)

This article is about Liberty Shoes Ltd, a company from Leicester, England. For the Indian manufacturer of the same name, see Liberty Shoes.
The Statue of Liberty replica, which stands close to the location of the Liberty building

Liberty Shoes Ltd was a shoe-manufacturing company in Leicester, England. Its premises were located in the Liberty Building in central Leicester, an architecturally-significant building that was demolished amid some controversy in 2002.

Liberty Shoes Ltd

The company was founded by the Lennard Brothers in 1877. One brother, Samuel, served as a town councillor in Leicester, and later became mayor of the city.[1] The firm was initially known as the Lennard Shoe Company, and appears in trade directories as early as 1887.[2][3]

By the early twentieth century, the company specialised in the production of high-quality footwear for women.[4] At its peak the company employed 650 people, and was an important force in the local community; but by the 1960s it had entered a period of decline, and its eventual closure began with 200 layoffs in 1962.[4][5]

Architecture and heritage

The Liberty Building was opened in 1919, and the well-known Statue of Liberty replica was added two years later – it was from this statue that both the building and the company would soon get their name.[6][7][8] The building used state-of-the-art construction techniques for its time, including the Hennebique system of reinforced concrete.[9] When completed, the internal space measured 42,000 square feet.[10]

In 1992 an application to demolish the buildings was made for the first time – two years later, the building was granted Grade II listed status. By this time the building had been vacated, and regularly suffered from vandalism and intrusion.[11] Its final use was as offices and the location of a printing works.[3] After much further campaigning, the building was demolished in April 2002.[12] The Liberty statue was relocated to a nearby roundabout, and student accommodation was built on the site.[12]

References

  1. ↑ "The architecture around us tells our city's history". Leicester Mercury. 28 Apr 2001. Retrieved 2013-01-14.
  2. ↑ 'Liberty Building timeline, Manufacturing Pasts, University of Leicester 2012.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 "Urgent work needed to protect building". Leicester Mercury. 24 Sep 1999. Retrieved 2013-01-14.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Rebecca Madgin, Heritage, Culture and Conservation: Managing the Urban Renaissance (Saarbruken, 2008), p. 32.
  5. ↑ Ben Beazley, Postwar Leicester (Sutton Publishing, 2006), p. 120.
  6. ↑ "Liberty Statue". Leicester City Council. Retrieved 2013-01-14.
  7. ↑ "Building plans for Liberty Works, 1919". My Leicestershire (Manufacturing Pasts collection). Retrieved 2013-01-14.
  8. ↑ For the statue, see: They made Leicester's Statue of Liberty, Leicester Mercury, 23/03/1998.
  9. ↑ The architecture around us tells our city's history, Leicester Mercury, 28/04/2001.
  10. ↑ "A new factory in Leicester". The British Builder: 123–6. June 1922. Retrieved 2013-01-14.
  11. ↑ Vandals plague Liberty building, Leicester Mercury, 30/09/1995.
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 "Factory is reduced to pile of dust", Leicester Mercury, 16/04/2002.

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