The Bolton Cobbler Who Invented Fell Running's Shoe
Author: Running Style | Published: 20 August 2026 | Updated: 20 August 2026
Walsh’s current range is small by design: a family of PB models built around a single last that has barely changed in fifty years. That is not a brand running out of ideas. It is a brand that solved a specific problem once, decided the solution still worked, and kept building it by hand in the same Bolton factory ever since.
An apprenticeship at Reebok’s predecessor
Norman Walsh was born in Bolton in 1931 and left school at 14 in 1945 to apprentice at J.W. Foster and Sons, the same Bolton firm whose spiked running shoes had outfitted Britain’s 1924 Olympic team. Walsh’s talent was recognised early: at 16 he was chosen to help make shoes for the 1948 London Olympics, and in 1954 he made the running spikes Roger Bannister wore to break the four-minute mile at Oxford’s Iffley Road track, according to Walsh’s own company history. He is also credited with making the football boots Nat Lofthouse wore to score both goals in Bolton Wanderers’ 1958 FA Cup Final win, though this detail comes from Walsh’s own retrospective rather than an independent source.
J.W. Foster and Sons became Reebok in 1958, founded by two of the original Foster’s grandsons. Walsh stayed with the renamed firm only a few years before leaving, on good terms, to start his own company in 1961.
Solving a problem no one else had
Norman Walsh Footwear spent its first decade making handmade shoes across several sports, including rugby, football, and track and field, each built to individual customers’ specifications. The turn toward what the brand is now known for came in the late 1960s, when Walsh, working close to the Peak and Pennine hills, developed the Pennine Adder, credited as the first purpose-built mountain running shoe. It caught the attention of fell-running athlete Pete Bland, and in 1970, the two collaborated on the Walsh PB, widely credited as the first shoe designed specifically for fell running.
1970: the year Walsh made the world’s first fell-running-specific shoe, the PB, with runner Pete Bland.
The PB’s defining feature was its pyramid-grip outsole, a pattern of small rubber studs designed to bite into wet grass, mud, and rock in a way that standard running-shoe treads at the time could not, according to Walsh’s own account and multiple independent retail histories. Mountaineer Sir Chris Bonington’s team wore Walsh PBs during preparation for the first successful ascent of Mount Kongur in 1981, and again on a 1985 Everest expedition, per Walsh’s company history.
A contested first
Walsh’s own history also credits the company with pioneering the use of EVA foam in a shoe midsole in 1971, four years before Brooks’ 1975 introduction of EVA in the Villanova. However, whereas the Brooks date has some independent corroboration in podiatric and industry retrospectives; the Walsh date does not appear to be confirmed anywhere beyond the company’s own account, so it is presented here as Walsh’s claim rather than as an established fact.
Fifty years of one shoe, one factory
Norman Walsh sold the business on his retirement; brothers Jon and Dennis Crompton bought the company in 1996 and have run it since, according to a profile in Lancashire Life. Jon’s son Jason later joined the company and became its creative lead.
The Bolton factory Walsh himself worked in remains in operation, and the company still uses hand-lasting, a construction technique where the upper is shaped over a foot-shaped last by hand rather than by machine, a method most mass-market brands abandoned decades ago.
The current range reflects that continuity rather than any lack of ambition: the PB Elite, PB Elite Extreme, PB Ultra, and PB Elite Racer are variations on the same last and outsole pattern developed in 1970, alongside a junior version. Walsh has not chased the stack-height and foam-technology race that has reshaped most of the running shoe market over the past decade. Fell-running guides note the brand is less dominant than it once was, with Inov-8 and Salomon now more commonly seen on British fell terrain, but Walsh’s core shoe remains in production largely unchanged, still made in the same building, by the same hand-lasting method, using some of the same lasts as shoes it produced in the 1980s.
A new collaboration: LANX x Walsh
In March 2026, Walsh entered a collaboration with LANX, a British footwear brand whose founder, known as Marv, grew up in Bromley Cross, near Bolton. The partnership produced two trainers, the men’s Bromley and the women’s Halliwell, both hand-cut and stitched at Walsh’s Bolton factory and built on the Ensign, the marathon-oriented silhouette Walsh is best known for outside its fell-running range. LANX named the women’s style after Halliwell Road, directly opposite the Walsh factory, and marked the launch with a short film shot on 16mm, staying close to the heritage-craft identity both brands have built around themselves. It is a small collaboration in commercial terms, but a useful sign that a fifty-year-old Bolton shoemaker is still finding new reasons to keep its factory running.
Bolton’s two running-shoe stories
Walsh’s story runs parallel to Reebok’s rather than apart from it. Both trace back to the same Bolton firm and the same family of shoemakers; both moved in different directions from that shared starting point. In 2025, Bolton Museum staged an exhibition covering both companies together, alongside J.W. Foster and Sons itself, treating them as two branches of the same local story rather than unrelated brands that happen to share a hometown.
Related reading
This article draws on Norman Walsh’s own published company history alongside independent retail, heritage, and trade-press sources. Where those sources disagree on exact dates or claims, both versions are noted in the text.