Hutton's is proud to have kept Scots shod since Victorian times Published on Saturday 2 June 2012 15:56 HUTTON'S Shoe Repair is on the ground floor of a grey Edwardian tenement at the corner of Elgin Terrace and Edina Street in Leith. Its neighbours here and on nearby Easter Road would have included, at one time, tobacconists and tailors, chandlers and chimney sweeps; all the motley merchants of the busy high street of yesteryear. Hutton's, however, is something of an anachronism, a little leather-fragranced time machine transporting customers back to an age of elegance and thrift. Ian Hutton, the 51-year-old proprietor, is the fourth generation - perhaps, he suspects, even the fifth - of shoe repairer in his family. The word "cobbler" is one towards which he feels ambivalent. His late father William couldn't stand the term, regarding it as a slight on his painstaking work; he never cobbled anything together in his life. Ian, however, does not mind being described as a cobbler and so - as I find the word beautiful and expressive - he will be called so here. The shop is small, perhaps little more than ten feet by ten; you would have to spend a long time walking back and forth before you wore out even the flimsiest of soles. The first thing to strike you, as soon as you enter, is the smell. You can almost taste it: a mix of leather, rubber, glue and ink with, I suppose, a base note of feet. Ian Hutton has grown inured to this scent, but some customers comment on it favourably. One small white-bearded chap sniffs the air with tremendous gusto as if here were nosing a rare wine. "Ah," he declares, "that is a proper old-fashioned cobbler's." The aspects of the smell he is enjoying are its appropriateness and vintage; it is an aroma which still exists in the world long after you might have expected it to have faded for good. A few years ago schoolboys started coming into the shop in the hope of getting high on the fumes, but Ian's mother chased them away. Ian's mother Alison - more properly, Mrs Hutton - is 79 years old, helps out in the shop on Tuesdays, and is most adept at climbing up the wooden steps from the cellar and through the trapdoor while carrying a tray of tea and scones. She does so with a grace and poise that hints at her years as a ballroom dancer, a hobby through which she met her husband, the two of them wearing their special non-slip dance shoes on nights out at the Plaza in Morningside. William had taken over the business from his father Charles in the 1950s; Charles had opened for trading in 1923, though the shop had been a cobbler's since 1901. The Huttons started in shoe repair in Glasgow in 1881. The family has, in other words, been keeping Scotland shod since the Victorian era. "I used to come in here when I was wee and watch my dad repairing the shoes, and I thought it was so brilliant how he did that," says Ian, who has worked in the business since he was 17. "When I first started I used to have people going, "I don't know what you're coming into this for, it's a dying trade." People still say the same even now. But I think as long as you do a decent job and charge a decent price you're always going to be kept busy. There is a steady trickle of customers. Women with a taste for Blahniks and Louboutins enter the shop clutching their expensive shoes in boxes, handing them over with visible anxiety like mothers helping evacuated children on to trains. Stilletos, so easily snapped or worn, are an important source of income for any cobbler. The boom times of the trade have coincided with the periods during which the stilleto is on trend, the slumps with its fall from fashion grace. Many customers, perhaps most, are regulars, but there are plenty of new faces, too. Since the economic downturn, increasing numbers of people who, previously, would have bought new shoes rather than bother with getting an old pair fixed are now making savings by visiting the cobbler. Indeed, there are even some poor souls who rake through the recycling bin outside the shop looking for footwear which, though badly worn, is in better condition than their own. A depressing sign of the times and no mistake. Vivienne Jaspers, 30, visits the shop at around lunchtime. A TV producer, originally from New Zealand, she has come to pick up two pairs of boots and to say a sad farewell. After nine years in the UK, seven as a customer here, she is returning to her native country. She will not miss Edinburgh's cobbles - "A treacherous city for a woman who likes high heels" - but she will miss the cobbler. "I have, like, 50 pairs of shoes," she says, "so I am in here a lot. My mum always bought Italian shoes, and her advice was you should get new shoes soled and heeled before you even wear them and then they'll last forever. David Cook, 47, another customer, is in to pick up his Tricker's - a fine pair of tan brogues. He has been getting steel caps added to the toes and heels. "I like the clicketty-cloppetty sound as you're walking along," he says. As a child growing up in Durham, he used to sneak a look at his gran's weekly copy of the Sunday Post, and thinks it possible that, on some subliminal level, he has been influenced in his footwear preferences by Oor Wullie's tackety boots. From grannies to trannies, all sorts of people visit the cobbler. "Transsexuals?" says Ian, brightly. We do get them, actually. There was a guy came in one time with thigh-length PVC boots, massive size elevens, and he wanted a new zip put in. There's another guy comes in, a nice guy, he buys ladies" shoes but needs to get them stretched before he can wear them. He's one of our regulars. The stretching machine, a boon for those suffering from corns, bunions and gender dysmorphia, looks as though it has come from the set of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, and is just one of many items of lovely vintage machinery - the stretcher, the stitcher, the patcher - which give Hutton's so much character. Then there are the distinctive hand tools, many of which belonged to Ian's father: sprig-file, nippers, swan-neck, awl. Ian wears a blue apron and works standing up at an old wooden bench, scratched and pitted with years of graft, from which protrude two heavy cast-iron lasts - holding devices shaped like upside-down feet. By my reckoning, in his time as a cobbler, he has worked on approximately a quarter of a million pairs of shoes. There are shoes everywhere in the shop. Those ready for collection are polished and ticketed and placed neatly on shelves. Put your shoes in for repair and they will, generally, be ready in two or three days. But not every customer returns in good time. Recently, a gentleman came into the shop - all male customers are referred to by Mrs Hutton as gentlemen; women are ladies - and asked for a pair of shoes which he had handed in two years previously. The gentleman had been in prison, he explained, and so, to his regret, had not had an opportunity to pop in. Shoes, these days, says Ian, aren't what they were. Much of what comes into the shop has been made cheaply in Vietnam or China from a mix of plastic and rubber. His heart gladdens when he has an opportunity to work on leather soles. Into the toe end of these he hammers three small nails, known as tingles; this is an identifying mark, a tradition he has carried on from his father's time, which shows that these shoes have passed through the careful hands of a Hutton. Ian is a proper old-fashioned craftsman, by which I mean that he derives satisfaction and personal expression - not merely money - from good use of his manual skills. There is a kind of moral force in this, I think. Cobbling, shoe repair, call it what you will, is what I would describe as an honest job. It is necessary work which anyone can understand but which not just anyone can do. A great deal of today's employment - certain aspects of the worlds of finance, management and communications, for instance - seems to be part of an unhealthy self-perpetuating loop, existing only as a way of attempting to create wealth for an individual and firm without being of any real use in the real world. This, I feel, has led to a sort of psychological underpinning of the European recession; there has been a widespread loss of faith in the work that we do. Man cannot live for bread alone. There has to be a sense of deeper purpose. So, in Leith, bent over his bench, bent as his father and forefathers bent, Ian Hutton goes about his work with hammer and awl. He is, as I said, the fourth or possibly fifth generation to do so, and it seems unlikely at this point that his own son will follow in his footsteps. He may, then, be the last Hutton to work the last; the last of his kind in more than one sense. There would be a sadness in that, of course, but it is the way of the world. He, meanwhile, keeps his eyes and thoughts on the shoes, wielding tools worn to his grip, in the little musty shop at the corner of two quiet streets. "Well," he shrugs, "it's what I'm used to, eh?"