Upstairs Workshop

The upstairs workshop of the Northcote Shoe Factory retains its workbenches, its tools, and the dust that settled over everything once the work stopped. Light filters through windows long past cleaning, landing on surfaces that have not been disturbed in decades. The room had a second floor's remove from the production floor below, where clicker presses stamped leather into shoe components and sewing machines stitched the uppers. Up here, the pace was quieter but the evidence of occupation is just as complete. The factory was purpose-built in 1926 on the corner of Arthurton Road and Helen Street in Northcote, replacing two smaller buildings on nearby Eastment Street where the shoe-making operation had begun. Northcote at that time was a dense working-class manufacturing suburb. Its industries included brickworks, tanneries, furniture making, hat production, and boot and shoe manufacturing. The 1933 Jubilee publication for the Borough of Northcote recorded the municipality as "an important, flourishing manufacturing city" with a population of 36,129. By the 1970s the factory was trading as the Purnell Shoe Company, a name independently confirmed by a pair of brown lace-up shoes in their original Purnell-branded box held in the State Library Victoria collection. The factory was one of a concentration of footwear manufacturers across Melbourne's inner north, a group that included operations in Collingwood, Fitzroy, Richmond, and Clifton Hill. Employment across Melbourne's footwear industry peaked in the 1960s at nearly 12,000 workers. From the 1980s, tariff reductions exposed Australian manufacturers to low-cost imported footwear, and small and mid-sized operations across the inner north closed one by one. The Northcote Shoe Factory's closure was part of that wave. When Lost Collective photographed the interior in 2012, the building retained its production equipment throughout: clicker press, sewing desk, vacuum sealer, dispatch area, smoko room with a radio still in place. The upstairs workshop was no different. Nothing had been cleared. The factory was demolished in 2016 and the site redeveloped as a residential complex.