About | Bootscrap

About Boot Scrapers

The design of the boot scraper was often influenced by the architecture or use of the building, commonly included in the architect's plans. Some boot scrapers are quite plain, home made and functional, other boot scrapers are decorative. There are a multitude of designs for boot scrapers, many have similar features and replicated across the UK and the world.

Boot scrapers were produced in a local foundry or forge, depending on whether the boot scraper was made in cast iron or wrought iron. They were designed to facilitate the practical human behaviour of scraping the underside of a dirty boot or shoe outside of a building before entering. The number of people who used a building, whether a residential or public building determined the size and number of boot scrapers required. With the gradual expansion of towns and cities in the 18th and 19th century, boot scrapers and the introduction of raised pavements aided the pedestrian in the popular pursuit of walking.

Boot scrapers have their own designated space outside a door, either on the front doorstep, attached to the building wall or moulded into the front pavement. Many early boot scrapers are built into the curtilage of the building and have listed building status.

These public and private installations are often painted in weather proof, galvanize, black metallic paint to withstand all weathers and made to last. If not taken away, there are still many boot scrapers still practical after nearly 200 years, they are used, mended and replaced. Recent mock Georgian housing developments are to be seen with boot scrapers installed.

There remains across the UK and the world hundreds of moulded pieces of metal, securely fixed, sticking out from a wall or pavement never far from a front or back door. They remain diverse and abundant items of architectural heritage. These accessories were once as common as doormats requiring a behavioural etiquette to use them.

Boot scrapers provide us with a present tangible and aesthetic link to the ‘lived’ past in the present. Cleaning the underside of one’s boots or shoes on a boot scraper outside a building was a familiar and repetitive action before entering a building from the outside street.

Boot scrapers are synonymous with urbanisation and expansion in the 18th and 19th century England, there was increased pressure to develop new housing and associated buildings to meet the increase in population in urban areas. As new developments were built so were special areas for walking created, a public area or thoroughfare, where people could walk safely and in clean surroundings. Walking for pleasure became a popular pursuit from the 18th century.

Additional information for Boot Scrapers

Websites / Publications

Untappedcities victorian-boot-scrapers-on-the-streets-of-nyc

https://frenchmoments.eu/who-we-are/

The Rise and Fall of the boot scraper

Official Catalogue of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry ...

Black country metalworks

Decrottoirs! Voetschrapers! Boot Scrapers!

by Laurence Rosier / Christophe Holemans

Published by Racine 2012

Wrought iron altar rail, South Germany 1704, pierced with floral ornaments. V&A Museum, London

Example:

St John Street, Oxford

A good example of 19th century urbanisation in England can be seen with the development of terraced houses in St John Street, Oxford. This housing development, on the edge of the city centre was part of 'the Beaumonts' started in October 1824. The first leases were granted for five plots in St John Street which is at right angles to the main residential and business street Beaumont Street.

Each house had it's own boot scraper, some of the scrapers were part of the architectural plan, other boot scrapers purchased by the owner for each house. As the new development progressed, the Pavement Commission laid a pavement, a raised platform above the road, an area designated for the pedestrian and for walking, keeping pedestrians clean and safe from oncoming road traffic of horses and carriages. Simultaneously water gullies and drainage were created to train water and obnoxious waste away from the new housing development into specially created caveats.

Boot scrapers were a common, external feature along the street when most towns and cities in the eighteenth and nineteenth century were alive with animals and people trading and carrying out business. Streets were a thoroughfare for horse drawn transport, working animals, dead animals sold at local markets. Streets were filthy with manure, mud and human waste.

In the 18th and 19th century, boot scrapers were an indispensable device outside every building in an environment that was physically and atmospherically filthy from thick, soot-drenched fogs and smoke polluted air that soiled clothes and buildings. Lee Jackson in his book ‘Dirty Old London’, describes the ‘nuisance and discomfort abounded’ through the abundance of filth in our towns and cities in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.

"City streets were filled with ankle deep mud and manure from animals, increasingly horse transport, cinders, ash from coal fires, overflowing sewage and litter. The residues of a growing population hampered walking in the street, the majority of whom permanently lived in insanitary conditions the contents of which spilled out into the streets: ‘old newspapers, cast-off shoes, and crownless hats’[1] - broken glass and mouldering food.

The trailing skirt fashionable in the 18th and 19th centuries allowed to drag along the Piccadilly pavement in London recovered the following relics: ‘ 2 cigar ends; 9 cigarette ditto; a portion of pork pie; 4 tooth picks; 2 hairpins; 1 stem of a clay pipe; 3 fragments of orange peel; 1 slice of cat’s meat; half a sole of boot; 1 plug of tobacco (chewed); sraw; mud; scraps of paper; and miscellaneous street refuse, ad lib" [2]

An iron boot scraper, a utilitarian accessory was placed outside the front door of a building, either on the left or right of the front door or on both sides.   A large household or busy public building like a school or church where people entered the  building at the same time, frequently had two boot scrapers or one large boot scraper with a 12-inch blade, for example. The size or number of boot scrapers was determined by the number of people entering a building, ensuring each person could their clean boots without delay.   Therefore preventing people risking entry into a building with soiled shoes and 'spoiling' the interior floors or carpets inside a building.  ‘Cleanliness and neatness are amongst the cardinal virtues of the household, the church, the school-room; and means of inculcating and promoting these virtues should receive the earliest and most constant attention.' (3)

[1] ‘London Dirt’ ,  Lloyds Weekly Newspaper.  1st August 1875
[2]  Jackson, Lee  ‘Dirty Old London.  The Victorian Fight Against Filth’  Yale University Press.  New Haven and London  2014   page  4
Lady F.W. Harberton, ‘ Symposium on Dress’, Arena Vol. VI, New York 1892, p.334.  For Harberton on ‘sputa’ on pavements, see Hearth and Home, 10th March 1892, p 531
[3] JG Hodgins, The school house: its architecture, external and internal arrangements, Toronto, 1876
[4] Richardson, Ruth “Dickens and the Workhouse”, page 118 Oxford University Press,  N.Y. 2012
(5) https://news.fitzrovia.org.uk/2013/06/10/plaque-unveiled-to-identify-charles-dickens-first-london-home/