The story of a shoe ...

Inuit shoe 1886.1.747 © Pitt Rivers Museum

This Inuit shoe (1886.1.747), made of sealskin, was collected by Arctic explorer George Francis Lyon during his voyages in the 1820s. Lyon commanded HMS Hecla under Sir William Parry in 1821, and HMS Griper in 1824, both voyages seeking the North West Passage. The second voyage was a failure—the anchor chains were lost in a storm which also badly damaged the masts and rigging.  Having barely made it back to England, Lyon was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford in 1825, and the record for this shoe says it was presented by him to Oxford in that year.

Lyon was perhaps more successful as an adventurer and early anthropologist than as an explorer. He had many interactions with Inuit people on these voyages and was tattood by them. His writings on Inuit people during these voyages have proven valuable to scholars since.

Sole of shoe 1886.1.747 © Pitt Rivers Museum

This shoe once had four strips of fur on the sole for grip on snow. It is exquisitely sewn with sinew (animal tendon) and part of an outfit designed for survival in the Arctic.


Laura Peers
Curator for Americas, Pitt Rivers Museum &
Professor of Museum Anthropology, School of Anthropology


See this shoe and more footwear made of animal skin on display in the Leatherwork case (L.63.A) on the Lower Gallery.

Tanning Tales

Over the coming weeks, the first redisplay of objects on the Museum’s first floor will appear. This case will display objects chosen to illustrate leatherworking and will show some of the wide applications for leather from clothing, headwear, shoes and bags to drinking vessels, buckets, saddles and writing materials, plus some of the specialist tools used in their manufacture.

Before preparing objects for the new display, our project conservator Andrew attended a week-long course ‘Understanding Leather - From Tannery to Collection’ hosted by the Leather Conservation Centre (LCC) and Northampton University‘s Institute of Creative Leather Technologies (ICLT):

"The course gave me a hands-on opportunity to follow the vegetable tanning process of a hide - transforming a salted animal skin into a beautiful finished piece of leather. Seeing the processes first-hand, and smelling and touching the hides, helped me to appreciate the skill of the tanner - how many steps are involved in the process and how many chances there are for things to go wrong along the way.

Partially-tanned deer and calf skin © Pitt Rivers Museum

"Very simply, tanning is a chemical process whereby skins are treated with chemicals known as tanning agents. These bind to the collagen proteins in the skin and prevent the skin from putrefying.

Tanning agents come in many types – Vegetable (or Bark), Mineral and Aldehyde. Different tanning agents produce different qualities in the leather – softer or harder, better tensile strength, different colours, etc.

Mineral tanning using chrome-based compounds takes just a few hours whilst vegetable tanning with oak bark traditionally takes 12 months and 1 day!

At the ICLT I followed a (much shorter) process of vegetable tanning using a number of different tanning agents:  

Some raw materials used in vegetable tanning © Pitt Rivers Museum

Traditionally, people of different areas of the world used tanning agents local to them and in good supply – in the UK this was oak bark; in Italy, the ground-up heartwood of the chestnut tree. 

Although the steps involved in tanning have probably changed little since ancient times, the machinery used today certainly has! In medieval England, tanning was carried out in pits where skins were hung or layered in a liquor containing ground up oak bark. Modern tanning is carried out in drums, something like an industrial washing machine:

Tanning drum with goatskin covered in vegetable tanning 
liquor © Pitt Rivers Museum

Today, skins are removed of excess flesh and fat by machine, de-haired by placing them in a drum in an alkaline mixture of lime, and then treated with enzymes in a process called 'bating'. This removes unwanted proteins and opens up the structure of the skin to allow the penetration of the tanning agent.

I was prepared for some bad smells along the way, but other than the smell of the salted skins and maybe a hint of ammonia, the tannery was a very clean place. Tight restrictions on waste disposal means that today's tanneries produce very little waste. Surprisingly, the ‘waste’ produced from the de-hairing contains many proteins useful in the cosmetic industry.

Kangaroo tail © Pitt Rivers Museum

The modern tanning process involves the prepared skins being gently turned in the drum along with a mixture of water, a purified extract of the raw tanning agent and added chemicals to produce the optimum acidic pH all at a controlled temperature. As the skins absorb and react with the tannins they are less susceptible to damage. The temperature is gradually increased and the drums turned more vigorously all of which contribute to speeding up the process from weeks and months to a number of hours.

Any animal skin and can be tanned from the common cow, goat and pig to the more unusual such as crocodile, salmon, seal and, on rare grizzly occasions, human.

The LCC has a large collection of different reference samples that are invaluable when trying to identify what an object has been made from.




The patterns of the hair follicles on the surface of mammalian skin can help in identification but often on museum objects they have been worn away, or obscured by surface treatments, paints or dirt, so you have to look for other clues. 

What animal do you think this bag is made from?

© Pitt Rivers Museum

© Pitt Rivers Museum

Yes, eel! Eelskin leather is highly prized. It is very smooth and exceptionally strong. Oddly however, it does not come from eels but the Pacific hagfish, a jawless fish also known as the 'slime eel'.

Today, there is just one remaining tannery in the UK manufacturing traditional oak bark leather - J&FJ Baker, based in Colyton, Devon. Watch this video to find out more about their process:

The new hide and leatherwork display at the Museum will reflect some of the processes and variety outlined above by including, not just calf and goat skins, but also items made from monkey, lizard, and fish, plus differently processed examples from vegetable tanned to brain tanned to alum tawed leather."

Hides and Heels: work starts on new leatherwork display

With the new displays of masks and carvings in the ground floor Court now finished, we are turning our attention upstairs to the middle floor of the Museum - the Lower Gallery. The project's target area, on the left wall as you enter the gallery, is home to some rather dilapidated, fifty-year-old displays of traditional crafts. Our plan is to retain these themes but give the whole area a facelift with new displays featuring more objects - better mounted, better lit, and better labelled.

The first case we are working on will contain artefacts made of skin, hide and leather. We have decanted a large case full of headrests (these will be displayed elsewhere) to free up this much larger space for the new display. This will allow us to unite the various shoe- and saddlery-working tools that were in a smaller, previous leatherworking display with a diverse range of objects from storage, many never before displayed. 

Left: the old leatherworking case dating to the 1950s (some items were
nailed directly on to the backboard!) and the existing display of headrests,
now emptied to make way for the new Skin, Hide and Leather display. 

The VERVE team spent many hours trawling the Museum's collections database and visiting the off-site stores to identify suitable material. More than 200 objects have been carefully selected, retrieved and catalogued to show the diversity of uses, animal sources and methods of manufacture, and are now being worked on by our Conservation Department.

Boxes of leather and hide shoes (right: North American moccasins) in storage

Currently there is no special display in the Museum dedicated to footwear and it was always envisaged that the new display would provide the perfect opportunity to showcase some of the Museum's fantastic shoe collections (some of these were recently loaned to the Oxfordshire County Museums Service for an exhibition entitled 'Head Over Heels'). However, working on this case led us all to appreciate a much larger range of objects in this category; our original conception of a 'leather' display has quickly grown to incorporate membrane, skin and hide too - to tell a more complete story about human beings have worked and utilised animal skin products. We have found everything from a leather drinking tankard to Japanese shoes made from salmon skin to an English leather violin.

Leather violin 1938. 34 648 © Pitt Rivers Museum

Salmon skin shoes 1900.78.35 © Pitt Rivers Museum

The violin is full size and resembles a normal wooden one, but the body is entirely made of leather. We have been trying to find others, so far with no success, so please get in touch if have ever seen anything like this before. 

The salmon skin shoes are called Chep-kere which literally means “fish boot”. They are from Hokkaido in Japan and were used by the Ainu, the indigenous people of Japan. The shoes were soaked in water before wearing to mould them to the wearer’s foot. The salmon skin was cut and used in one piece with sewing at the toe and heel. The skin has a scaly texture, providing a good non-slip surface. This type would have only been worn in winter on the snow and may have been stuffed with grass or worn with a sock for insulation.

We also came across this fantastic pair of boots!

Gambadoes 1888.12.1 © Pitt Rivers Museum

Each foot is more than 30cm long and after an initial reaction of "giant's boots!", it became clear that these are gambadoes. They are open boots or gaiters worn whilst riding to protect their legs and trousers from mud and bushes, popular from the 17th to the 19th centuries. The buckles at the top attached to the saddle and they doubled as stirrups. This particular pair were worn by farmers in the West of England. They are made from very thick, strong leather and look very functional at first glance, but upon closer inspection they are actually decoratively stitched around the top, with moulding near the side opening and brass furniture tacks around the base.

We were fortunate and delighted to coordinate this stage of the project with a visit from the Archaeological Leather Group (ALG) to the Museum. Their group included scholars, curators, conservators, archaeologists and leather-workers and they spent several hours examining the material, helping us understand various aspects of leather-working, advising on techniques and provenance, and suggesting intepretive themes. For ALG members, it was a rare opportunity to get up close to museum collections and have personal input into the project. We had a very informative and enjoyable day and swapped several contacts to take the discussions further.

Members of the ALG examine a selection of boots, from Inuit sealskin
'wellies' to Chinese boots for bound feet, to a pair of women's boots
from Poland c. 1900 with bright pink laces © Pitt Rivers Museum

ALG members discuss an 'alum tawed' saddle and cushion from India
1966.1.1316 © Pitt Rivers Museum

We have focused on a 17th-century leather shoe-boot as our Object of the Month for June. Work will begin on designing and installing this case this summer so if you visit the Museum in the autumn, do keep an eye out for it!