Wards Supa Dukes: Adventure Playground

From the collection of

MACE is the strategic lead organisation for screen heritage for the East and West Midlands regions. An independent charity based at University of Lincoln, MACE preserves and makes accessible a collection of more than 100,000 historic moving images representative of the diverse cultures and histories of communities throughout the heart of England from the Lincolnshire coast to the Welsh border.

Wards Supa Dukes: Adventure Playground

Media Archive for Central England
Barwell
1968-01-01
Sound

Supa-Dukes: the boy proof boys' shoe with the all action look.

In the years before the trainer became the ubiquitous footwear for children, shoe companies battled to come up with robust products that could cope with the punishment of heavy street play. The Leicestershire made Ward's Supa-Duke was one such attempt: a shoe for 'the all action boy' complete with welded sole. Shown here being tested out by a couple of junior James Bonds in another new innovation of the 1960s: the adventure playground.

George Ward Ltd manufactured shoes at a factory at Barwell in Leicestershire from 1900 until 1989. George Ward (1871-1951) who founded the firm was a local councillor and the Liberal MP for Bosworth for a brief period in the 1920s.

Near Your Local Cinema

Local goods for local people! Screen advertising wasn’t all national brands and chain stores.

Purpose-built cinemas began appearing around Britain shortly before WWI, booming in popularity during the War and developing into the ‘picture palaces’ of the 1920s - when adverts jostled for space alongside newsreels before the main feature. Local businesses were quick to see the potential of a big screen and a captive audience to promote their wares.

While they didn’t have access to the budgets of the national brands, regionally-specific businesses had the benefit of that personal touch. Products and services evolved over time, but that scratchy ad for your local Indian restaurant, so integral to the cinema-going experience into the 1990s, had its roots in the booming entrepreneurship of the industry many decades before.