Doc Martens are one of those quintessentially British things that, like the royal family and lorries queuing on the M20, turn out actually to be Germany’s doing. The ancestor of what became the ‘Air Wair’ sole was designed in 1945 by a German army doctor with a sore foot. Amid the postwar hurly-burly, he ‘salvaged’ a cobbler’s last from a shop in Munich and knocked himself up an air-cushioned shoe to relieve his discomfort.