Despite being a Londoner for over 25 years I will never stop thinking of Hartlepool as home. It was the place I was born, the place I grew up, and the place where I made many of my naughtiest memories. So I like to keep in touch, and one of my guilty pleasures is to follow the RSS feed of the Hartlepool Mail. It’s a great place to keep up with the doings of the town, and it is also, like many local papers, a fantastic source of quirky stories that are simply meat and drink to us creatives.
The particular gem I want to share today was actually published back in August. Appearing among the latest antics of Hartlepool’s bad boys and advice to local families on the best places to stock up for the return to school, it is a short article on the smallest shoe shop in Britain.
You can read the story
here
But in essence it concerns a 25 year old cheese-wedge-shaped shoe shop which, at 3ft wide, is the width of three size 11 shoes. It could be the narrowest shop in Britain, though it is not clear whether it actually is.
Several things leapt out at me about this story. The first was that despite my best efforts I couldn’t work out why it was there. If you read the piece you will notice that the store in question isn’t located in Hartlepool but in Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire. For those of you who aren’t up on your geography, a Hartlepool resident, living in the centre of town, who upon seeing this article decided to give Peter Scott shoe shop a visit, would have to drive a cool 320 mile round trip just to pick up a pair of their favourite footwear. And even then their chances of satisfaction would be pretty low since, being the smallest shoe shop in Britain, they hold very little stock on site.
As quests go, it doesn’t hold much appeal. Cast your mind back to when you were a teenager and your parents informed you that you were all having a nice family day out. Remember how your heart sank when it turned out that you weren’t going to Alton Towers but to an old ruined roman fort instead. Just imagine how much worse it would have been if the destination in question, after 3 hours plus of driving, was to be a smelly old shoe shop so small that you wouldn’t even be able to put your feet up on the chairs.
And In the short embedded video clip Oliver Salter, the 31 year old entrepreneur who has owned the shop since 2021 seemed like a decent enough, and perfectly normal, guy. He didn’t strike me as a man with a passion to smash the nation’s smallest shoe shop record at all costs. A shame, since it would have made the article much more exciting. Stories about folks clawing their way towards an unusual goal or often surprisingly gripping, and the more unusual the goal the better.
Of course, most likely, the story was the result of an overworked and underpaid journalist pushing hard against unrealistic deadlines for content that just might get enough clicks to satisfy the advertisers. Too often journalists in fiction are either portrayed as heroic folk fighting against a deep state that wants to smash them down, or as immoral hacks who would smother next door’s cat if it made for a scoop that would push them one more inch up the greasy poll. The reality for most journalists is that they are just trying to get enough words on the page or screen to ensure that they still have a job tomorrow before heading off to take little Jamie to football practise and scrape up a barely edible meal from the freezer prior to falling gratefully into a wine-induced stupor on the sofa before bed.
I can imagine that for this thoroughly bored, and wholly fictional journalist, the lure of a crazy enthusiast fighting to be crowned as the tallest baker in Britain or as having the longest continually open convenience store in the whole of Europe might be exactly what they need to set them on a crazy adventure that, in the end, has no point beyond doing something different in a life that, without them noticing, has become little more than an existence.
For me, those are the best stories, and I might have a go at writing one, just as soon as I’ve clicked publish on this post so that I hit my deadline.
