Balgha shoe 2024 is a research-led design project developed at the Royal College of Art (2024) as part of NA’s ongoing work on collective making, material transparency, and Palestinian craft. The project takes the balgha — the traditional leather shoe worn across Palestine, the Levant, and North Africa — as both a cultural form and a starting point for contemporary design.

The research traces footwear from pre-British mandate in Palestine through archival images and interviews with shoemakers, including work with artisans and factories in Hebron’s leather industry: tanneries, the Camel Sandal factory, and Abu Yazan of Al-Misk Leather Goods. The study documents how shoe-making was once central to Palestinian towns — with workshops in every hai al-eskafieh (shoemaker’s quarter) — and how the industry today faces land confiscation, restricted imports of tanning chemicals, misleading origin labels, and the displacement of skilled labour. Against this backdrop, the project asks how a shoe can carry honest information about who made it, where, and under what conditions.

The NA shoe reinterprets the balgha’s simple two-part leather construction through a new bottom sole: a molded, vegetable-tanned cowhide footprint that maps the hands and knowledge of Palestinian makers rather than national borders alone. The upper uses soft goat leather in the tradition of the balgha slipper; the sole is formed over a custom last, with lines that extend the idea of balaagha — to reach — as both movement and narrative. The design process, from paper prototypes through material trials to the final model, is recorded in the project booklet Process Journal: Design of the Balgha shoe.

Developed in dialogue with craftspeople in Hebron and informed by NA’s methodology, the project bridges historical craft knowledge with present needs: products that name their makers, trace their materials, and sit within the social, environmental, and economic systems they belong to.