Listing Text

728/0/10011 REGENT STREET
23-APR-04 Regent Works (Kettering Bedding Centre)

II
Boot and shoe factory, now bedding showrooms. Date 1890. For Hales and Jowitt, boot and shoe manufacturers. Red brick with blue brick plinth and stone and blue brick dressings. Tile roofs. Plan of 3-storey main range to street with single-storey workshop ranges to rear. 3 storeys. 9-window ranges at 1st and 2nd floors(some paired windows) of cast-iron windows either under brick segmental arches or flat stone lintels. Those under brick arches have very fine margin lights, those under flat arches have fine ornamental mullions and all are original. The windows to ground floor are nearly all paired under flat stone, now painted, lintels with similar mullions. Office entrance to far left under hood with curved pediment supported on brackets and, to far right, goods entrance under basket arch. The rear of the front block also retains fine fenestration similar to the front and a gable with taking-in doors on each floor and a hinged hoist on the top floor. Various single-storey workshop ranges to rear.
INTERIOR. This retains the original internal divisions and joinery including open-well staircases with stick balustrades and turned or square newels.
SOURCES.
EH Northamptonshire Boot and Shoe Survey, Site Report No.15.
Morrison, Kathryn A., with Bond, Ann, 'Built to Last? The Boot and Shoe Buildings of Northamptonshire', forthcoming, fig.59.

This finely-detailed factory is little altered and the carefully detailed and homogeneous front shows it to be a factory but the design also fits into the terraces of houses either side and opposite. This combination of factories and housing adjacent to each other is a particular characteristic of the boot and shoe industry.