Storage Shelves

The steel shelving is still in position along the full length of the storeroom wall, brackets and uprights intact. Cardboard boxes cover the floor below it, flattened and scattered as though dropped there and never retrieved. An office chair sits upright in the middle of the room, surrounded by the debris. Clerestory windows at the far end let daylight fall across the scene. The shelves are empty. Whatever was stored here was taken or sold before the doors closed for good. The Northcote Shoe Factory was purpose-built in 1926 on the corner of Arthurton Road and Helen Street, Northcote. The company had already been operating out of two smaller buildings on nearby Eastment Street before purchasing the corner land and constructing the new facility. By 1933, Northcote was described in its Jubilee souvenir programme as "an important, flourishing manufacturing city," with boot and shoe production part of a broader industrial base that included brickworks, tanneries, furniture making, and hat manufacturing. The factory was one of many in Melbourne's inner northern suburbs, a concentration of footwear manufacturing that stretched across Collingwood, Fitzroy, Richmond, Clifton Hill, and Northcote. Employment in Melbourne's footwear industry peaked in the 1960s at nearly 12,000 workers. By the 1970s the Arthurton Road factory was operating under the name Purnell Shoe Company. The closure came during the contraction that followed tariff reductions across the Australian footwear industry in the 1980s and 1990s. Low-cost imports made the economics unworkable for small suburban manufacturers. The exact date the Purnell Shoe Company ceased production has not been confirmed from available sources, but the factory was abandoned by the time Lost Collective documented it in 2012, production equipment and storage fittings still in place throughout the building. The factory was demolished and the site redeveloped as a residential unit complex in 2016. What remains is the photograph: shelving, boxes, a chair, and light through clerestory windows at the end of a storeroom that no longer exists.