Imagine knocking through a wall during a renovation and finding a battered leather shoe that has been sitting among the bricks for three hundred years. It was not left behind by a careless builder. For centuries, people in Britain and beyond deliberately tucked old shoes into the fabric of their homes, and historians call them concealed shoes. Vanity Fair Italia has revisited this odd custom, a reminder of how much meaning we pour into what we wear.
A shoe in the chimney
Concealed shoes turn up behind walls, inside chimneys, under floorboards, in roof spaces and above door frames. Most recorded finds come from Britain, though examples have been found across Europe, North America and Australia, and most date from the 17th to the 19th centuries. They are rarely new or precious. Usually it is a single shoe, heavily worn, repaired again and again, and often a child’s.
The best-known explanation is folk belief. A shoe takes on the shape of the foot that wore it, so it was thought to hold something of its owner. Placed at weak points such as the hearth, a doorway or a window, it might trap, distract or ward off witches and evil spirits. Other theories link the custom to good luck or fertility, or to builders marking their work, and the Wiltshire Museum notes that the true purpose remains uncertain.
The finds keep coming. In 2022 builders restoring a 17th-century cottage in Avebury, Wiltshire, found three leather shoes hidden in a chimney wall, together with thatching shears and small horseshoe-shaped pieces of metal. According to the Wiltshire Museum, the group includes a man’s shoe with a long square toe, a woman’s high-heeled shoe and a small work boot, all latchet-tie styles dated to around 1640 to 1670. Sometimes shoes appear in such “family groups”, one for each person in the house.
Everyday fashion history
Northampton Museum and Art Gallery, home to one of the world’s great shoe collections, keeps an international Concealed Shoe Index and has recorded thousands of finds with researchers from the University of Hertfordshire. For fashion historians these shoes are priceless in their own way. Grand portraits show silks and jewels; concealed shoes show what ordinary working people actually wore, how their footwear was made and how carefully it was mended.
There is something touching about objects valued precisely because nobody would see them again. We still give our belongings that kind of quiet significance: a well-loved leather bag that softens with the years, a pendant worn as a keepsake, or a deep red garnet pendant or a ring chosen as a personal good-luck charm. And if you ever find an old shoe in your wall, the museums would love to hear about it.
Sources: Vanity Fair Italia, “L’assurda superstizione di chi nascondeva le scarpe nei muri” by Maddalena Gomez (25 October 2026); Wiltshire Museum, “Concealed shoes from Avebury”; Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre, “Concealed shoes”; Northampton Museums and Art Gallery, shoe collection and Concealed Shoe Index. Featured image: AI-generated illustration.
