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Traditional Art

The Traditional Art Of The Shoe Repairer

For previous generations, the sight of a shoe repair shop was an integral part of the high street in the United Kingdom. Once as vital as the grocers, the bakers and the butchers, you'd find a shoe repairers, also known as a cobblers in practically every town in the UK. However, with mass production techniques and the global economy we are now living in, is there still a need for this trade?

Shoe repairers, or cobblers as they are often known often offer additional services in addition to the repair of shoes. Most commonly, you'll find a shoe repairers providing key cutting services from the same premises. Other services include dry cleaning, engraving and the replacement or repair of watch straps.

Surveys vary but report that there are between 3,000 and 6,000 shoe repairers currently in the United Kingdom. Several large supermarkets are now providing an in-store shoe repair service, in addition to those running their own businesses, or being employed as part of a large chain.

The main duties of a shoe mender include the replacement and repair of heels, staining and dyeing of leather, cleaning and polishing, and the fixing of zips, buckles and straps.

While it may not be cost-effective to mend many of the cheaper footwear being sold today, sending shoes for repair, instead of replacing them makes good economical and environmental sense, particularly where higher-end shoes are concerned. A good shoe mender can restore a pair of shoes back to an almost-new condition and prolong their lives by numerous years.

Certainly, in our ancestors times, it wouldn't be considered to throw away a pair of shoes just because the heel had worn out. In this case, the shoes would always be taken to the cobblers.

Becoming a shoe repairer requires no academic qualifications from school, but specialist training is often provided on the job, under the supervision of an experienced teacher, and there are recognised industry qualifications and NVQ/QCF qualification.

The saying 'a load of cobblers' is often used in the United Kingdom to describe something that is either not true, or 'a load of rubbish'. The origin of this comes from Cockney Rhyming Slang and is nothing to do with the shoe repairer himself, but instead of one of his tools; the awl, used for piercing holes in leather.

The phrase originates from 'a load of cobblers awls', which is rhyming slang for balls, or testicles. One of the first uses of the phrase in print was in the UK music magazine, "Melody Maker", when in October 1968, one of their reporters described a comment on a club in Glasgow as a 'load of cobblers'

Although shoes have become a throwaway product for many people, there are still those who often use the services of their local shoe repairer, so this is a trade that has the potential to continue for many years.

About the Author

Carl Fraser is Managing Director of Totally Commerce Ltd, owners of
http://www.TotallyShoes.co.uk
- Retailers of leading brand footwear in the UK. Totally Commerce Ltd also operate several other websites in different business areas.

What is the seperation point between traditional art and modern art?

Where and when did the transition happen?
What and when is traditional?
what and when is modern?
I'm having trouble making distinctions?

Please help
Thank you

When did modern art begin?
Jonathan Jones The Guardian, Thursday 18 September 2008 Article historyThe modern age did not begin in 1900, like a lightbulb switching on (then off, then on again), at least according to the National Gallery. This week it refused to renew an agreement with the Tate by which Nick Serota's outfit has been able to claim exclusive responsibility for art after that date. But if the cut-off between modern art and all that came before is not 1900, or 1907 when Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (above), or 1917 when Duchamp exhibited his urinal - when was it?

By the same logic that the Tate claimed the rights to art since 1900, it could have argued that it properly should be in charge of everything since Édouard Manet painted Olympia, his portrait of a Paris prostitute, in 1863. For many critics, this canvas marks the birth of modernism because of Manet's strangely flat style, his lack of emotion or even desire. But is Manet that much more radical than Eugène Delacroix, whose The Death of Sardanapalus (1827) is an orgy of sex and drugs that floats free of pictorial gravity?

Surely, if there's one artist we can all agree to call modern, it's the Spanish artist of madness and war Francesco Goya - who died in 1828. Italy can take it still further back. What artist is more modern in his disturbing realism than Caravaggio (died 1610)?

I think the artist with the strongest claim is Michelangelo (1475-1564) who pioneered the idea of artistic originality, and whose last work, the Rondanini Pietà, is as abstract as Brancusi.

Of course, once you push modern art back to Michelangelo it becomes a meaningless term and this is the point. Every generation wants to believe it has broken with the past. When we praise art as modern we're saying it seems urgent and meaningful to us now - and that can be as true of a cave painting as a Damien Hirst vitrine.

Clarification Re: ChosunNinja & Modern vs. Traditional Sword Arts!

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