Walsall Still Makes Saddles: Profile of a Family Firm
The Walsall Leather Museum took its last visitors on Saturday 11 April 2026 and closed at five that afternoon. The building on Littleton Street West is a Victorian factory block put up in 1891 to make saddlers’ ironmongery, and for 38 years it held the story of the town’s saddle trade.
The museum is not closing for good, according to Walsall Council. The council has bought a former drapers store at 1–3 The Bridge, between the High Street and the Walsall Leather Skills Centre, and the collection sits in storage while plans take shape. Its announcement gave no opening date for the new site.
The saddlers carried on.
One of them is a family firm that trades as Heritage Bespoke Saddlery. It works from Walsall, a Marlow runs it, and its own website says photographs of its old workshops hang in a saddlery museum in the town. This profile uses only what that site says, what independent sources confirm, and a plain note wherever the two do not meet.
A town that grew up around buckles
Walsall’s trade began with metal, not leather. A history of the leather industry published by Walsall Council traces it to medieval loriners, the makers of bits, buckles, stirrups and spurs, who drew on iron, coal and limestone from the surrounding district. Bridle cutters settled nearby to be close to that hardware, and leatherwork became a major local trade in the early nineteenth century. The railway reached the town in 1847. By 1851 there were 75 firms making bridles, saddles and harness, and around 1900 Walsall had close to a third of the saddlers and harness makers in Britain.
Then the engine replaced the horse.
Firms turned to travelling bags, hat boxes and wallets, and from the 1960s overseas producers with lower overheads pressed harder. The Knowle Society notes that about 10,000 people once worked in more than 150 saddle manufacturing companies in Walsall, and that about 40 of those firms still exist.
The Marlows, as the firm tells it
The firm’s history page calls it a family-run saddle and tack manufacturer that makes everything in Walsall, and describes itself as “A 100% English Company in every way.” It was formerly called Global Saddle Co.
Matthew Marlow runs it. He is the company saddle fitter, a job he has held for more than 25 years, and his father Brian trained him from the day he left school. Brian spent 65 years in the business before retiring. A 1971 photograph on the page shows him in the Walsall factory with two colleagues the page names only as Marg and Lilley.
The page reaches further back. Matthew’s great-grandfather, it says, was Joseph Thickett, Mayor of Walsall from 1923, and a great-great-grandfather had premises on Marlow Street. The mayoralty can be checked: Wikipedia records Thickett as the town’s first Labour mayor, taking office in 1923, and as an alderman until his death in 1938. That he is Matthew’s ancestor rests on the firm’s account alone.
Two larger claims sit on the same page, and no independent confirmation turned up for either. The firm says it supplied saddles to the Persian army in 1971 for the 2,500th anniversary of the Persian monarchy, and that, trading then as Global Saddle Co, it made all the saddles, bridles and harness for Paramount’s 1984 film King David. The film is real. Wikipedia lists it as a Paramount release directed by Bruce Beresford, with Richard Gere and Edward Woodward, interiors shot at Pinewood and a US release in March 1985. It was a commercial failure, earning about $5.9 million against a budget near $21 million. The anniversary was real too, held at Persepolis from 12 to 16 October 1971. What a Walsall saddlery contributed to either event is the firm’s word alone, and the page reads best as a family record, not a press file.
What the workshop makes now
The business specialises in awkward fits: horses with large shoulders, high withers or barrel-shaped bodies, and tall or long-legged riders. Saddles are made from scratch for the individual horse and rider, not altered from stock, and the range covers show, working hunter, general purpose, dressage, endurance, polo and Icelandic types. A patent-pending LS Yin-Yang jump and event saddle is the firm’s own design, built to leave the shoulder free, with a forward-cut flap for long legs. Bridles are made to order for unusual head sizes.
At the time of writing, the site lists its traditional general purpose saddle at £999 off the peg or £1,099 made to measure, with woollen flocked panels, and charges £100 plus fuel for a fitting visit within the UK. Matthew travels for fittings across the UK, Europe and further afield, the history page says.
One detail the site does not give is the leather. Neither the history page nor the product page names a type, so nothing here claims bridle leather for these saddles. The question still matters, and the next section shows why.
Where bridle leather enters
A Walsall saddler’s hides are not raised in Walsall. Horse & Hound explained in 2003 that a hide counts as English by where it is finished, not by where the animal lived. The same article noted that traditional oak bark tanning could take up to eighteen months where modern methods take six to eight weeks, and that of the 24 trade members of the Society of Master Saddlers, all but two were in Walsall. It is a twenty-three-year-old piece, so those counts will have moved.
Finishing is where bridle leather is made. J&E Sedgwick, founded in 1900 and working from purpose-built Walsall workshops since 1956, says on its history page that its curriers finish bridle leather by hand using techniques dating from the early 1900s. Marcellino NY cuts its briefcases from Sedgwick bridle leather, so the material that serves a bridle is the material that carries the case. What English bridle leather actually is covers the hide itself, and the split between cordwainers and saddlers covers the trades that handled it.
The museum’s move, and what it holds
Under the council’s plan the collection is stored to best-practice standards during the transition. It includes a specialist library of about 600 books, trade catalogues and historic photographs of local factories and workers from Victorian times. No mandatory redundancies are planned, and the council intends to involve the leather industry in designing the new museum. Campaigners argued, the Express & Star reported, that part of the museum’s appeal was its home in a former leather-working factory.
The museum also keeps voices. A University of Leicester library blog describes 95 oral history interviews recorded between 1989 and 2013 with people who worked in the trade, since digitised. The same post observes that “there has also been a revival in the traditional saddlery and bridle trade.”
The firm says its workshop photographs hang in a saddlery museum in Walsall. The page does not name the museum, and this research could not confirm whether the pictures are among the items now in storage. That is a question for the firm and the council.
Questions about Walsall saddlery
Is Walsall still a saddle-making town?
By the sources above, yes, on a smaller scale. The Knowle Society puts the survivors at about 40 firms, down from more than 150.
Is the Walsall Leather Museum open?
Not at Littleton Street West, which closed to the public after 11 April 2026. The museum is moving to 1–3 The Bridge, and the council’s March 2026 announcement gave no opening date.
Does the Marlow family firm say what leather its saddles use?
No. Its history and product pages give no leather type.
What a bench holds that a case cannot
A museum can keep a catalogue, a photograph, a tape recording. It cannot keep the fitting itself: a saddler reading a horse’s back and deciding what the tree has to do about it.
The Marlow page offers little polish and no press cuttings, only names, dates and a handover from father to son. Set against a town that went from more than 150 firms to about 40, that handover is the scarce thing.
Hardware is part of the same inheritance. Walsall began with buckles, and why solid brass hardware outlasts the leather around it follows that thread into the briefcase.
Sources
- Heritage Bespoke Saddlery — A history of Heritage Bespoke Saddlery
- Heritage Saddlery — The Heritage “Traditional GP” saddle
- Walsall Council — Council confirms new location and transition plans for Walsall Leather Museum (11 March 2026)
- Express & Star — End of an era: Walsall Leather Museum opens for final time before relocation
- Express & Star — Flashback to 1988: Walsall Leather Museum got royal seal of approval
- Walsall Council — A history of the leather industry in Walsall (PDF)
- Knowle Society — Walsall saddlers to the world
- University of Leicester Library Special Collections blog — Walsall Leather Museum (30 November 2021)
- Horse & Hound — Is your tack truly “English”? (21 May 2003)
- J&E Sedgwick & Co. — Our history
- Wikipedia — Joseph Thickett
- Wikipedia — King David (film)
- Wikipedia — 2,500-year celebration of the Persian Empire
