Canons, the bespoke shoemakers in north London, is one of the most exciting recent developments in bespoke menswear. Simon Bolzoni (above) and his team have created a modern, efficient, and also now quite large operation that has grown despite little marketing or eye-catching design.

It’s exciting because bespoke rarely feels like a growth industry. We’re all still basking in the glow of the attention it got after 2008, and that was 17 years ago. Most of the time new names in tailoring or shoemaking are just the result of sole operators splitting off from bigger operations. 

Canons has grown consistently since it opened, to the point where it’s now producing twice as many bespoke shoes as its previous incarnation - Foster’s - did on Jermyn Street. The team has shrunk and then been rebuilt, with Simon reimagining what modern bespoke production and product should be like. 

The result is bespoke shoes that are more consistent than they were in the past, higher quality (something I can bear personal witness to) and delivered faster as well - the delivery time has come down from around 18 months when the team were on Jermyn Street to nine months today. 

Let’s briefly explain a bit of that history. Foster & Son had been a shoemaker in the West End of London for a long time - since 1840. It made for many famous people, including Charlie Chaplin, Paul Newman and (my personal favourite) Oscar Peterson. 

Foster's introduced ready-to-wear shoes in the 1960s, and it sold both on Jermyn Street until 2020. We covered them in 2014 and reviewed bespoke shoes made there in 2016.

In 2018, they began an ill-fated project to open a factory in Northampton, with the help of Japanese investors. This had problems from the start, chief among them the fact they were selling shoes before they knew what their costs were.

“We didn’t even have any samples at the start,” says Simon, who helped develop the lasts for the factory. “It was such a shame because the team in there was great, the quality was fantastic, but really those shoes should have been sold at over £2000 and they were being offered for £800.”

Covid made it all untenable in 2020, as wholesale orders dried up. Shortly after that the 25-year lease on the Jermyn Street shop also ended, and it was decided not to renew. Foster’s started to look for a new home. 

Simon was managing director at that point, and in 2022 put his own money up to buy the company. But he decided to change the name of the new operation to Canons, not Foster’s. Why?

“Foster’s was mostly known for ready-to-wear, just because it sold more of those shoes than it did bespoke,” says Simon. “But there was an issue having the same identity for both a £500 shoe in the shop and a £5000 bespoke shoe. It didn’t make sense.”

Using a new name was also an opportunity for a fresh start. “The bespoke shoes in the previous decade had become too inconsistent, and probably not high enough quality overall.” This was something I talked about in my review - the make of my shoes was good, but the fit was not that great and the finishing misjudged. 

“We had been slowly improving aspects of the bespoke since 2018, changing the patterns and the way we made lasts, switching outworkers as well,” says Simon. “The new name was a way to put a stamp on that, and on the new workshop.” 

It is amazing the difference branding can make - even buyers of bespoke shoes that I knew personally saw the operation differently as soon as it had a new name. It would have been much harder to change people’s minds without it. 

“Heritage can be a burden,” adds Simon. “I saw that in the process of setting up the factory - it created expectations around the product, and it was something some people liked, others didn’t. Canons gives us the opportunity to redefine everything, even if part of that is weaving in all the designs and the history that Foster’s had.”

I’ve been visiting Simon and the team at Canons for the past two years. 

Back in 2023, when Canons was launched, Conor (above) reached out and said he was contacting all the old customers. When Simon heard about the issues I’d had in the past, he offered to see the shoes in person and work out if they could be improved. When they couldn’t, he said he’d remake them. 

This is something he says he did with all customers who had had poor experiences. That will have been costly, but it is also an effective way to re-establish a reputation, and at the moment seems in keeping with Simon’s general attitude to the product. 

Since that first meeting I’ve been in the process of making a new pair of bespoke shoes with Canons, which I will cover and review later. Throughout I’ve been impressed by the thoroughness exhibited by Simon and Reece (below) when it comes to lastmaking and fitting, however, and by the in-house processes they’ve established - such as the Fosters Fade. 

Fosters Fade (above) was an effect that the company became known for when it was on Jermyn Street, something customers could see on shoes in the shop window that had been slowly bleached by the sunlight coming through the plate glass. 

It was the kind of thing that was also catnip to bespoke fans in the 2010s, as people discovered chisselled toes, fiddleback waists and hand-painted patinas. Foster’s offered ready-made shoes with it as a finishing option, and it could be done on bespoke too. 

“We stopped doing it as soon as I set up Canons,” says Simon. “It was done in quite a cheap way and the effect wasn’t very subtle.” It’s a mark of how Simon has gone about developing things, I think, that he spent a long time working on alternatives, and has now re-introduced it. 

“The process takes 2-3 days, because you need to work on the leather for a little while and then let it dry to see the effect. That’s one key to making sure it isn’t too much - another is we now do it on the uppers before the shoes are made, rather than at the end.”

Similar developments Simon has introduced are colouring their own leathers, to offer a greater range of subtle colour variations, and developing their own colours of suede with the tanneries. 

When I decided on the material for my shoes, I was offered a bigger range of brown suedes than anywhere else and - more importantly - a better understanding of the shades (colder/warmer, casual/formal) and how they would look. 

Canons is also experimenting with different makes of shoes, for example using lightweight rubber soles, or even rubber-soled shoes with no midsole at all, a very comfortable option. A significant difference between here and other brands that have expanded into styles like this, is the emphasis Simon places on keeping everything in-house. 

It’s worth a trip to the Canons workshop just to see these various things in person. And I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to mention the workshop itself. 

Of course it’s lovely having a shop in a historical area like St James’s. But you couldn’t build a workshop like the one Canons now have in Islington there. The new space is open and communal, the front half covered in customers’ wooden lasts. 

In fact, you can see Simon’s eye for design in the way the space has been put together, with a mirror surrounded by a sea of lasts. It’s begging for selfies. 

Around the big central table are Reece and Conor, and Simon puts a lot of the efficiency of Canons down to the fact that everyone is there, talking to each other and communicating orders. (The rest of the 20-strong team is outworkers; it’s the norm for English shoemakers to work in this way, and Foster’s always did, though Canons has slightly more overseas in France, Japan and elsewhere.)

Conor is often looking after the leather goods, which include belts and bags. Foster’s was famous for its despatch boxes, and those are still made the same as they were in the 1960s (Simon brought production in-house in 2018). 

The team actually got a fair bit of equipment from Simpson’s, another manufacturing re-imagining that we covered in 2017, but shut during Covid. You start to see why it’s good to see someone like Canons doing so well. 

And the next chapter in the story will be the reintroduction of ready-to-wear, which is meant to happen any week now. The launch was planned for earlier in the year, but US tariffs have put things on hold. The new shoes will be sold under the Foster’s name, made in Northampton by another factory, and have the same names and lasts as they did in the past. 

Canons is open by appointment at 6 Northampton Street, London. Bespoke shoes start at £4,750 plus VAT. Trunk shows are to the US only, but five different cities. Details here. Canons also plan to start travelling to Hong Kong and Japan soon.