Save our shoe shops

We can't buy shoes on line, it just doesn't work.

Probably my favourite shoe shop in Paris.

I need to go to Paris.

I know we all need to go to Paris all the time, that is a just a fact, but there is a specific reason I need to go now.

I have to buy some shoes - and that just doesn’t seem to be possible in the UK anymore.

Shoes here seem to have divided into two categories: £900 or absolute crap.

And I genuinely need some fresh winter shoes. All the ones I have – the few pairs that are both comfortable and chic – are tired looking.

I don’t have wild ambitions. I don’t aspire to designer gear, all I really need is a good pair of all-weather ankle boots (probably of the Chelsea genre) with a little luft, to flatter the shorter leg, and a classic loafer.

Of course, there are some perfect loafers in Church’s. They are £900. My car didn’t cost much more than that. Just no.

The shoe department in Le Bon Marché in Paris. That banquette is calling my name.

So I went to a few of London’s department stores and all they seem to have is designer stupidity, or dreadful Kurt Keiger and its evil love child Carvela.

I’m not buying shoes where I can smell the glue.

In some department stores – like Fenwick in Tunbridge Wells, where I continued my shoe hunt yesterday – the only brands they stock are the terrible Glue Two. They are so nasty. How do they have this weird hold on department stores? And who buys them? They aren’t even cheap – they just look it.

In a similar vein, for the boot, I liked the look online of a pair in The Overpriced Shop (sometimes known as ‘And Other Stories’) so I trotted into one of the stores to check them out and found they were hard and cheap looking. For £175.

I went in to try them on – and smell them – because I’ve learned the hard way the folly of buying shoes online.

The only ones I feel safe to do that with are my multiple repurchases of Birkenstock Arizonas and Hafflinger cork clogs. I’ve had at least six pairs of each over the past twenty years. I know my size.

But normally buying new shoes is a process, where you have to sit down and have a trained person bring you different sizes and styles to try. Which is the service you still get in the myriad wonderful shoe shops in Saint Germain – and in the department stores in Paris, where they sell a plethora of wonderful brands.

General fashion stores here, such as Jigsaw, Whistles, Boden, The White Company and all the rest have a big shoe offer online, but keep very few styles and sizes in the shops, because they’re bulky and complicated. That just doesn’t work for me.

Shoes are a very specialist clothing genre, with more specific fitting needs than probably any other item – even bras – so they need specialist shops to sell them, with specialist sales persons.

They aren’t an amusing little money-spinner add-on like earrings and novelty hair scrunchies.

In the end, I couldn’t wait to go to Paris to get a pair of winter shoes I can wear up to London without feeling Burlington Bertie from Bow and on that trip up to Tunbridge Wells, I ventured into Russell & Bromley.

That is a shop I have to confess I have never quite gelled with, as it didn’t seem to know where it sat in the market. It seemed like too much to pay for a brand I didn’t want to boast about. Well, that’s changed.

Russell & Bromley is a proper shoe shop. There’s a shoe tree waiting for you on the banquette where you try on and very willing assistants to advise and bring the different styles and sizes.

And the moment I stepped over the threshold it smelled of leather. Not a whiff of boiled-bone glue.

I bought a great pair of their platform trainers – in black leather, lined with tan leather, which just shows round the edge in the most adorable way.

My lovely new shoes - look at that heavenly leather lining!

They are incredibly comfortable, smart in a cool way, make me several inches taller, have that wonderful new leather smell – and didn’t cost much more than the nasty boots in The Overpriced Shop.

So, until I can next get over to Paris, I do have somewhere to go for proper shoes and the service that comes with them, but in the long term I’m hoping there will be customer-driven turnaround with shoe shops, similar to what has happened with independent bookshops.

Just when it seemed like all was lost and they were going to disappear forever, as we bought all our books online, on Kindles and from supermarkets, people realised that they actually did know what they’d got, just before it was gone.

Now, with strong and loyal customer demand, independent bookshops are opening all over and booming. We have two in Hastings and I love them both.

We need the same thing to happen with proper shoe shops.