Sole survivor

Cobbler to the world Terry de Havilland’s newest collection is sold exclusively in Notting Hill. Pendle Harte meets him to talk wedges and winklepickers

Above: Terry and Liz de Havilland

Terry de Havilland is truly the godfather of sole. He is the man who made the wedge heel a classic, whose glitter snakeskin shoes were worn by Marc Bolan and without whom glam rock just wouldn’t have been the same. His King’s Road shop, Cobblers to the World, lasted throughout most of the 1970s, flogging fabulous footwear to everyone from Bianca Jagger to David Bowie. It went bust when Terry’s shoes were killed off by the glitter drought of 1980s fashion – but now they’re back, reincarnated for the 21st century by de Havilland’s never-faltering love of the wedge.
After two decades of neglect from the fashion world, self-taught Terry has relaunched himself as the clever cobbler that London used to know and love. The three-colour metallic snakeskin wedge is selling very well at Notting Hill’s Sera of London, where an entire basement room is dedicated to Terry’s new collections.
When I meet him and his wife/muse Liz at their east London studio, they’re both full of an enthusiasm that’s very un-fashiony, because they’re not really fashion people at all. When Terry started on his renaissance a few years back and thought he’d show at London Fashion Week, he was surprised when they asked him for samples, and even more surprised when they rejected them. “I couldn’t believe I’d had the elbow from them when they were holding it in the grounds of a museum I had shoes in,” he cackles. Terry is a proper old school East End lad, smiley and cheeky, with an approach to design that’s instinctive and fun, not precious or stuffy. He has never bothered with sketches, he just starts cutting shapes, and he attributes a lot of his garish colourways to the acid he used to take. He and Liz work surrounded by random remaining shoes from Terry’s many periods, Liz in his classic ‘toe-out, lace-up’ skyscraper heels, among boxes full of whole snakeskins in unlikely colours.
Punk had no interest in snakeskin wedges, or metallic leather heels, or any of the shoe things that Terry loved, so in 1979 the shop had to close. “I couldn’t handle punk. The Doc Martens thing was happening and I couldn’t handle that – all those girls in pretty dresses and Doc Martens. It was horrible.” He doesn’t have much time for flats at all, and the utilitarian Doc Marten is the absolute antithesis of a five-inch, four-colour Terry de Havilland creation. Not long after he opened his shop on the corner of Beaufort Street, the Natural Shoe Store arrived opposite and is still there today, after around 30 years of selling what Terry
calls “boring shoes”. For Terry, the Birkenstock is beyond comprehension.
The son of an East End cobbler, Terry (born Higgins but became de Havilland because it sounded more exotic) grew up around shoes – especially wedges, which were his father’s trademark. “He made black market shoes during rationing,” explains Terry. “Everything in the shops was utilitarian and meanwhile he was making wedges. He worked with a spiv called Curly who would come from Maida Vale in a Jag and bring orders from showbusiness people in the West End.”
Shoemaking was a skill he discovered in his father’s factory. “When I came out of the army my dad was making winklepickers and needed some help so I got pulled in. Kids would come with little drawings of shoes they wanted and I was turning them into shoes and that’s how I realised I could make them. Those winklepickers had such sharp points, they were weapons.” But Terry was still holding a torch for his dad’s 1940s wedges, fuelled by the memory of a woman in leg irons who had shrieked with glee when his father made her a pair of wedges. “For the first time in her life she had a pair of fashion shoes – you’ve never seen a woman so happy in your life,” he enthuses. In 1969 Terry retrieved an old wedge heel from the attic and made some samples (this was his psychedelic phase, so they were all seriously colourful) and “suddenly they were stocked in Ken Market and Britt Ekland was queuing for them”. Tragically, Terry’s father got electrocuted in the factory and died soon afterwards, so Terry took over the business in Hackney as his shoes started to take on the world from W8. “I met Patti Boyd and that crowd. Ken Market was fantastic in those days. Freddie Mercury had a stall.”
There followed a decade of snakeskin slippers, metallic stilettos, python platforms and glitter wedges, with Terry’s footwear gracing the dancefloor of Studio 54 and the feet
of the world’s most beautiful women. Sadly, Terry’s hardly got any of these creations left. His archive was stored in a garage that got broken into and everything was lost, along with press books containing years worth of cuttings. What remains with Terry and Liz is a pitifully incomplete collection of odd shoes, with a far bigger array on display at Golborne Road’s Rellik, where co-owner Steven Philip has been buying pieces of de Havilland with an addict’s hunger for the past 20 years. “Terry’s shoes remind you of fun,” says Steven. “They’d never remind you of going to Tesco, would they?” He’s got around 100 pairs in total and sells them for £150-£250 depending on their condition. “Terry is one of the greats,” asserts Steven.
So what happened to Terry when punk displaced him from the King’s Road? “I went underground,” he grins. First, into the realm of the Goth, where he launched a company called Kamikaze Shoes, making 800 pairs of “cheap and cheerful” black leather numbers with straps and skull buckles and no trace of the de Havilland name. This gradually branched into the fetish underworld, where Terry crafted rubber thigh boots for a clientele spanning MPs, surgeons and Morris dancers. “We’d get city guys coming
in and leaving taxis running outside. Once we had a group of rabbis who came from New York for matching thigh boots, all size 11.”
But he never forgot the wedge. In the 1990s he and Liz had a shop in Camden Market called Magic, serving the fluorescent dreadlock/cyberpunk brigade and he started experimenting with the odd low-key platform sole which shocked the aesthetic of the time but appealed to Terry as much as ever. By the late 90s he’d started a small sideline under his own name again and when it was discovered by Rachel Weisz, Sophie Ellis Bextor and a stream of stylists, he decided to approach London Fashion Week
(only to receive the elbow).
It was around this time that Liz got a call congratulating them for doing the shoes for Miu Miu’s catwalk show. “And we said, ‘did we?’” Miu Miu had come up with a metallic snakeskin wedge looking suspiciously (well, identically) like a 1973 de Havilland wedge (only somehow not quite as perfect). There was much talk with lawyers, but how could they possibly take on Prada? In the end, BBC2 made a documentary about the whole thing, which made no difference to the case but gave Terry and Liz the benefit of some publicity, leading to various new contracts and making the fashion world aware that Terry wasn’t, as many thought, dead. No – he was back, and new commissions included shoes for FrostFrench’s catwalk show as well as a partnership with Office.
Terry’s sense of humour is a constant. His love of the painted shoe and the picture show is ongoing; for
a Chelsea Arts Club recent auction he donated 20 pairs of canvas wedges which were painted by artists including Peter Blake, Ralph Steadman, Sarah Lucas and Alan Jones, raising more than £100,000 in all. Shoe painting projects of his own include a pop art shoe as an homage to Roy Lichtenstein and a bright graphic homage to Clarice Cliff. “A Clarice Cliff shoe – imagine!” giggles Liz.
Terry’s Lonsdale Road basement shoe room (downstairs at Sera of London) stocks his new collection
as well as offering a made-to-order service. Like the wedge but want it to match your dress? Terry’s got snakeskins in the most unlikely colours, so there’s sure to be something to suit. What better way to dip a toe into one of London’s most celebrated shoe histories?

www.terrydehavilland.com