Park your car by the library in Woodbridge in Suffolk and amble down to John Ives, Footwear Specialists, with its white Georgian windows and its green awning. Tucked away on a little shelf against the back wall is a shoe called a Loake Brothers' Trent brogue. It is made of best calf leather, and the sticker on its sole reads £89.99. Handle it, and it begins unostentatiously to speak for itself. Bury your nose in its rich, almost sensual leather smell. Feel the silkiness of its upper, the stiffness of its welted soles. Burnished, antiqued tan calf, leather-lined. A grown-up, serious, sensible shoe. A shoe that says you're the sort of chap who spends his weekends in the country. A men's winged brogue, to give it its proper name.
"Loake Shoemakers, England," it says inside the heel. Then, at the side: "Trent. Last 365 2/7 size 10. Made in England." Where in England? Kettering, Northamptonshire, to be precise. And Chennai. That's the place that used to be Madras. In Tamil Nadu. In India.
The recent story of British shoes has not been a happy one. Back in the 60s we used to produce about 200 million pairs a year, most of them in or around Kettering and Northampton. But cheap imports from developing countries have taken their toll. Now British footwear manufacturers make just 34 million pairs a year, and most of those are exported. Just 1% of the shoes now sold in Britain are made here. The rest tend to come from China, Taiwan or Portugal. Today just 14,000 people work in the industry in the UK: 50 years ago, the figure was 10 times that.
And now even the term "made in England" doesn't necessarily mean completely made in England. Most of the major manufacturers still based in the UK have their uppers made abroad and shipped here. Shoes from Start-rite, Clarks and Doctor Marten are all made this way. Loakes are not an exception. But if anything, they hung on a little longer than most.
It was five years ago that Loake Brothers decided to move about two-thirds of its closing operation - the stitching of its uppers - to India. David Earle, Loakes's production director, has the air of a man who has had to make some tough decisions. Of course he'd like to turn the clock back, he says with resignation. The company had to shut one of its factories; jobs were lost, though most went through natural wastage. Loakes wouldn't have survived without the change.
"It's a matter of economics," Earle says. "I would far prefer to be making these shoes in their entirety here. It would be far more convenient to be able to do that. I could go down to the factory floor and talk to people. But we can't afford to ignore what other manufacturers are doing. It was a matter of facing reality."
And so the story of our Trents, their journey from field to shoebox, is rather longer than it might have been a few years ago. About 12,000 miles longer.
It isn't a single journey, of course. There are bits of at least five different animals in these shoes; probably more, given that part of the heel is made of leatherboard, which is compressed from scraps. But the real trademark of this shoe is its calf-leather upper. And so with a calf we will begin.
A year or so ago, this particular calf will have been grazing somewhere in western France: a toffee-coloured Limousin, perhaps, or a creamy, curly-headed Charolais. It was reared for veal, but in the process of becoming escalopes or blanquette, the beast donated its hide to the shoemakers' cause.
At the age of four months, our bullock was killed and taken to Annonay, near Lyon, for tanning before being shipped to Kettering. Before it could fulfil its destiny, it faced inspection in the Loake factory to ensure that it had not endured any messy encounters with barbed-wire fences or broken bottles during its short life - a scar on the hide means a mark on the shoe. This upper leather is expensive, about £4.50 a square foot, and you need about two and a half square feet to make a pair of men's shoes.
In the old days, the journey of that two and a half square feet of leather would have been a short one once it reached Kettering - a quick trip round the factory, a brief stay in the warehouse, then down the road to the shops. Now, though, the hide must travel by sea - by air, if the order is really urgent - to Chennai, on the south-east coast of India.
Nudge through the heaving, shimmering traffic and dust of this vibrant, overpopulated city, take a left turn down a pocked, tree-lined road where flat-roofed factories squat behind white walls and security gates, and you arrive at Radhika Exports, otherwise known as the Indian branch of Loake Brothers' closing department.
And here, perhaps a little surprisingly, is Radhika herself. Not just a woman in a man's world, but a Sikh woman in a Muslim man's world (leather has traditionally been a Muslim business in India). But Radhika, vibrant in a pastel-flowered outfit with a white scarf, makes it all look easy. Upstairs in a cool office where the air conditioning hums is Radhika's husband Jatin Singh, who has spent almost 40 years in the shoe industry. He started out at Bata, a Czech-owned company. His old boss was the father of Vikram Seth, the heroine of whose novel, A Suitable Boy, marries a manager from a Czech shoe company. Vikram was always a bright lad, Singh says mildly.
But the dynamo behind the outfit, as its name denotes, is Radhika. Before Loakes came along she was making uppers for other western companies in a range of factories around Chennai. Before that she made quilted jackets for C&A in Mumbai. With this new business, though, she decided to consolidate. Now she and her husband, who runs the financial side while she oversees the factory, employ 155 people. Things are looking up for the shoe industry in Chennai.
Being the only woman running a leather factory in the area has its benefits, Radhika says. Most of the workers are women and they like having a female boss; although she was, she admits, viewed with suspicion by many of the men in the business when she started up more than a decade ago.
"People weren't very ready to accept me," she says almost casually. "Now they come to me for advice when they have a technical problem. They understand that I know my job."
While upstairs is cool, white and fresh, downstairs on the factory floor the air is full of whirring. Rows of women sit at tables or sewing machines, stitching, sticking or cleaning. The windows are open but the ceiling is low and the air is thick with the smell of glue. Today there has been rain and the breeze is merely very, very warm. But Chennai has been labouring for weeks under a heatwave. A few days ago the temperature in the factory reached 56 C, Singh notes with something approaching pride. He wonders aloud if the workers should come in earlier or go home earlier to minimise the effects of the heat.
No one seems to be feeling the strain today, though, and work is proceeding at an orderly pace. Staff are paid a monthly salary, not piece rate, so they take things steady. At 10am and 3pm a tea boy comes round and everyone stops for 10 minutes. While they drink the workers squat on the floor or stretch their legs outside. They work eight hours a day, six days a week.
Singh checks the order number stamped in our shoes - 1726MS - and produces a date. Cutting began on December 29 2001, he says. Line number one made our Trent upper. About 50 different people each had their own tiny portion to make.
Mulivelu Malliga attaches the eyelet facings for the laces, stamping in tiny metal rings that can only be seen if you look inside the shoe. She used to work for another shoe company, but it was a longer walk from home. She is married and likes to get back in the evening to look after her seven-year-old daughter. Malliga takes home 1,900 rupees a month - about £27. So it would take her about three months to earn the amount our shoes cost in the UK. She looks a little stunned when she learns this. That's a lot, she says. "I suppose if I had that much money I would buy a gold chain," she says after a few minutes' thought. She thinks some more. "A gold chain is security. Certainly, yes, I would buy jewellery."
The final stitching of our shoe, running along the middle section below the eyelets on a sewing machine, is done by Palani Jayraman. It is one of the most difficult jobs in the factory: he earns 2,600 rupees a month, about £37. Jayraman used to work for a company that made uppers for Italian shoes, but he prefers it here. He earns 150 rupees a month more, for a start. But his journey to work is long - he has to leave at seven to be here by nine.
Mani Vellakami makes the final inspection before the uppers leave the factory. She, too, used to work for another export company, where she earned 1,000 rupees a month. She now earns 1,500. "I feel comfortable here," she says. "At the other factory I used to get fevers and they didn't like me taking leave."
Radhika laughs, teasing her: "She just didn't want to come to work," she says. "They say they have a fever just so that they can stay at home." Mani doesn't respond.
Not all the raw materials for our shoes were shipped to India from Europe. The polyester and cotton threads are made in Madurai, India, by a subsidiary of the UK firm Coats Viyella. The cow whose hide made the lining, as opposed to the uppers, was Indian, too, possibly from the Punjab. It probably died of old age, for Hindu belief proscribes the slaughter of cattle: more than half the hides tanned in India come from animals that died naturally.
Soon after it died, the cow's hide was tanned using chromium sulphate and other chemicals. Pollution from tanneries in India has become a major issue in the past few years, and the government has been trying to clamp down to prevent the poisons that they emit from getting into the water system. These can cause prostate cancer and kidney failure, as well as destroying crops and making farm animals ill. Many tanneries have been closed for continuing to pollute, but environmental groups still complain that the measures taken by the government have proved inadequate.
Take a couple of hours' drive from Chennai, across flat countryside and you will come to a dusty, middling-sized town called Ranipet. While Chennai is the place for making uppers, Ranipet is a tanning town. In the centre, men on motorbikes weave through the traffic with rolls of hide tied behind them.
The leather for our shoe lining came here, to Sujatha Exports on the Sidco industrial estate, in its "wet blue" state. Wet blue means just what it says. After chromium tanning, the hide is wet and blue, and can be transported without rotting. It is tanned again to give it its final colour and texture.
Rajathinam Balaji employs 35 staff - 20 women and 15 men - in his dark, roaring cavern of a tannery. Deep in the heart of the place, four huge wooden barrels howl repeatedly as they turn, tossing the hides in a mixture of water and tan-coloured aniline dye.
Barefoot, in just a shirt and rolled-up trousers, is Ponn Muthu, splashing about in the effluent water from the barrel; standing up at the side to pour in more dye as it turns; plunging his arm into the mess of hides and muddy-coloured water. He earns about 3,000 rupees a month - a little over £40. "I have been working here for five years," he says. My previous company was closed down because they didn't have the right treatment plant. The government is very restrictive now." Anyway, he adds, the pay is better here. The tannery industry has grown along with the shoe business, and there is work aplenty.
While the men work the barrels, the women run machines to flatten and soften the leather. Among them is Dely Lakshmi, 18, who has been working here since she left school a year ago. She's pretty and diminutive, dwarfed by the huge, vibrating machine from which she pulls hide after hide while standing on a platform.
She likes it here, she says. "I get to work on all the different machines, so there is a lot of change. And I can walk to work in the morning because I live just two kilometres away." Did she ever consider doing anything different? She looks puzzled. No, she says, she never thought about it. Lakshmi takes home 1,000 rupees a month (£14). It's enough - she lives in a small house with her father, mother and three siblings.
Outside the tannery is a series of pits in which solid waste is filtered out, and at the bottom of the road there is an effluent plant which serves the whole Sidco estate. Balaji says it's very environmentally friendly - it helps to grow a forest. But an academic from the Madras School of Economics recently carried out eight different pollution tests on the output from the Sidco effluent plant and found that it breached four of them. A ditch across the road from Sujatha Exports runs black with the dye-stained water from another nearby tannery.
From Ranipet, then, to Chennai, and from there, via Southampton, to Kettering. Usually the journey takes between five and six weeks. Here our uppers will be united with all the other materials that will go to make them into shoes. They don't look much now - the leather is a flat, uniform colour and the upper is splayed and inelegant - but here they will be transformed.
If anything, the Loake factory in Kettering is more old-fashioned than Radhika Exports. It is split into three parts - bottom stock (soles), the making room, where the shoes are finished, and a warehouse, all sewn into a few streets of terraced houses near the centre of the town. A minority of the company's shoes are still made here in their entirety; the majority have their uppers made in India.
If you ask an operative at Radhika Exports why he moved there, he will reply that the money was better. Ask someone at Loake Brothers the same question and he will usually tell you that his old employer closed down. A few decades ago there were 26 shoe factories in Kettering. Now there is only Loakes, and a small outfit making specialist shoes for people with disabilities.
Inside the factories there is light and air, and a bewildering variety of names. They love their names in the shoe business. Orvy. Sicknote. Ernie the Edgetrimmer, whose real name is Michael. Norman Humphrey. Norman, we soon learn, is what is known in the trade as a character. He can introduce us to wrinkle-chasers, welt-sewers, bottom- stitchers, gang nailers, seat-parers. He knows what to do with a heated knerling wheel. There isn't enough pride in the shoe trade, he says. "The skills in a place like this are basically no different to what they were in Victorian times. But it's undersold. It seems to be a trait in this country that if you are skilled you are rubbish. You're better off on the dole."
The beauty of the Trent shoe, Norman explains, is its Goodyear Welted sole. Everything is sewn on to a reinforced strip of leather. It makes the shoe totally rebuildable. A shoe like this is special. Not one of your stick-on jobs. All the staff in the factory are wearing cheap shoes, of course. You wouldn't wear shoes like this to work here, even if you could afford them.
Shoes are different from some other trades. You are not "in" shoes in the way you might be "in" tea, or rubber. There's something pleasantly horny-handed about shoes. Perhaps it's the blitz spirit that makes shoe people stand together. So the atmosphere is cheerful, though the pace is faster than at Chennai because the staff are on piece rates.
Our shoes came through in the week of April 24, and one of the first people to handle them is Melvyn Cox, who cuts the soles using leather from the Masure tannery in Tournai, Belgium. This leather is vegetable-tanned, using oak and mimosa bark. Melvyn loves the puzzle of getting as many soles as possible from a hide. It's always a challenge, he says.
Melvyn has been in the business 26 years and takes home £200 a week. He has seen some changes, most of them bad. "Gone are the days of the 50s and 60s when could just leave school and say: 'I want to be an engine driver.' I've seen the diminishing of every industry in Britain. I think now we're at ten to twelve. I just hope I won't be here when we reach midnight," he says.
The heels, made of cellulose and leather board from a firm called Robus in America and yet another different kind of leather from Colyton in Devon, are pressed together here using 80 tonnes of pressure. About 70 people handle our shoes as they work their way though the Loake factory in Kettering.
Up the road in the making room, our shoes are sewn on to their welts, a shank made of Scandinavian pine is put in and the bottom of the sole is filled with a mix of Portugese cork and acetone before the leather insole is stuck on. This is the only really smelly bit of the factory. Under a new EU directive, glues in the European shoe trade must be water-based, not solvent-based. Gone are the days when you could be off your head all day, Norman says.
In Chennai, most of the workers are women. Here most are men. Only at the end of the line do our shoes come into female hands again, in the burnishing and polishing section, where they take on their final, waxy, antique sheen.
And so, wrapped in a soft green cloth, packed in a box, our shoes are finally ready to leave. Five cattle, some cork, some thread, some glue and a lot of work. Eyelets courtesy of Malliga in Chennai, sole-cutting from Melvyn in Kettering, lining from Lakshmi in Ranipet. United at the end of their travels, and ready to start walking.