Atherstone, Warwickshire

Forgotten industries (2): Where you got that hat

I know, I know. Today’s building is hardly a beauty. An abandoned, brick-and-concrete factory, built probably at some time in the early-20th century, looking as if it’s waiting for what is tamely known as “the economic downturn” to come to an end before the speculators get busy on another canalside development. But even such unloved lumpen-architecture has its history and its interest.

Look at some film footage of a busy city centre in the early-to-mid 20th century – the period between the two World Wars, perhaps, or even the 1950s. Look at the men and at what’s different about their appearance: nearly every one is wearing a hat.† A sea of trilbies or flat caps in most towns, the occasional fedora or Homburg, endless bobbing bowlers in the City of London. Hats had long been part of the male wardrobe and were long part of the economy – a multitude of hat shops and, in the background, people and companies making hats. So where did they all come from, these hats of yore? If you were rich or upper class or both, you could buy your hats from one of the upmarket hatters in town. But the masses were more likely to wear mass-produced hats made in factories, and for centuries there were several of these factories in the town of Atherstone in Warwickshire.

Hats produced in Atherstone found their way all over the world. Billycock hats for slaves in the southern states of the USA, military headgear for British troops, trilbies by the million for everyday wear, they were all made in Atherstone, which had been a centre for hatting since at least the 17th century. When some of these markets disappeared, there was a decline in the industry, and some firms closed. The legion of hat-wearers, however, those British men who wore hats to keep their heads warm and to shade their eyes from the sun and because wearing hats was what men did, kept some of Atherstone’s hat-makers going. But in the end, hat-wearing fell out of fashion and there was just one firm, Wilson and Stafford, who took over a couple of their rivals and carried on making hats in this building by the canal until 1999.§

So there it is. Rows of broken windows (facing roughly northeast, to give useful working light, I suppose); purposeful if dingy brickwork and concrete framework; the Coventry Canal. A building that’s not important enough to be listed, or beautiful enough to be looked at by many except disaffected stone-throwers. But a vital part of history and everyday life for past generations of local people. As vital and everyday as the hats on their heads.

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† They’re in books, too. Once you start looking, hats are everywhere in the literature of the not-so-distant past. From the headgear of James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom, which bears the worn inscription “Plasto’s high grade ha”, to the “disreputable” hat of John Mortimer’s Rumpole of the Bailey, they are rarely items of glamour, but often revealing of their wearers. For treatments of hats and what they mean to their owners, I’d recommend searching out the elegiac piece on “Hats” in Michael Bywater’s glorious Lost Worlds and the short memoir “The Homburg Hat” in Richard Cobb’s People and Places, in which Cobb recalls a train journey to his public school and evokes the cringing embarrassment that can ensue when a teenage boy is not dressed exactly as his peers expect and require him to be.

§ And now if you buy a hat in the UK from anywhere other than a prestige hatter like Lock, it’s likely to have been made abroad. As an occasional hat-wearer myself, I can report that two of the three in my own wardrobe were made in South and Central America.

Crown Passage, London

The web site of the most famous London hatters tells us that if we jump into a London cab and ask for the premises of Lock, the driver will point his vehicle towards St James’s Street and deposit us at the door of number 6, home of the best hatter in the world. The St James’s Street frontage is reassuringly Regency, just the kind of shop window we’d expect for a traditional business like this, the sort of place where you can still buy a top hat or a bowler. They don’t call it a bowler here, though. At Lock, it’s a Coke hat, after William Coke of Holkham, Norfolk, landowner and farmer, for whom the Locks made the first such headgear in 1850. But not all Coke-wearers or Fedora-fanciers know that this important emporium has a back entrance, in the appropriately named Crown Passage, which you can find off King Street.

The facade in Crown Passage is even older than the main one. Many of the little shop fronts in this side street are Georgian, and Lock’s looks late-18th century. The small wooden bay window on its serpentine brackets is a reminder of the period when shopkeepers were starting to be a bit more assertive in their architectural display, pushing their windows out towards the street to attract passers-by. But they were only allowed to invade the pavement-space by so much – there were strict regulations about how far they could protrude. In a narrow street like this – it’s little more than an alley, really – your windows were only meant to stick out 5 inches or less.

So this shop front, like its Georgian neighbours, is quite modest. Glazing bars divide the panes, and we’re a world away from the big plate-glass windows of today. There’s only room in there for a few hats, tastefully displayed. But that’s all they need. After all, the name ‘Lock’ above the window tells us all we need to know.