SoleReview UK
🇬🇧 Independent Footwear Reviews
Founder & Footwear Editor · Leeds, UK
I spent eleven years working as a physiotherapy assistant for the NHS — not a physio myself, but alongside physios, every day, watching what foot pain actually does to people.
Heel pain came up constantly. Plantar fasciitis especially. I'd hear the same things over and over: the dread of the first few steps in the morning, the shoes that felt fine in the shop and useless by lunchtime, the money spent on "supportive" trainers that somehow made things worse.
In my late thirties, after years of long shifts on hard hospital floors, I got it myself. And I did exactly what everyone I'd been watching for a decade had done. I bought Hokas because a colleague swore by them. I spent £130 on a pair of Orthofeet. I tried three different insoles. I read every "best shoes for plantar fasciitis" article I could find.
That was the thing that bothered me most. The advice wasn't wrong, exactly. It just wasn't built for the way real people actually live — standing all day, walking to the shops, getting through a shift, not running marathons.
Once I found a combination that actually worked for me, I started keeping notes. What I'd tried, what helped, what didn't, and why. A colleague asked me to share them. Then another. Then a friend outside work who'd been dealing with the same thing.
The notes turned into a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet turned into a blog. The blog turned into SoleReview UK — a proper, structured review site built around the things that actually matter to people who spend their days on their feet, not abstract spec sheets.
I'm not cutting shoes in half with calipers. What I have is more than a decade of watching what foot pain does to people across hundreds of patients, plus my own experience going through it.
Every review starts with what people are actually saying — in forums, in reviews, in conversations — about what worked and what didn't. Not what the brand's website claims.
Nurses, teachers, retail workers, walkers. The right shoe for an eight-hour hospital shift is different from the right shoe for a daily three-mile walk — so I make sure both get covered.
No single shoe is best at everything. If a brand has genuine strengths — even one I'm not recommending overall — I say so. That's the only way these comparisons stay useful.
SoleReview UK is not a clinic and I am not a physiotherapist or podiatrist. I'm someone who worked alongside clinical professionals for over a decade and went through plantar fasciitis-style heel discomfort myself. Nothing on this site is medical advice — if you're dealing with severe or persistent pain, please see a qualified healthcare professional.
Some of the links on this site may be commercial in nature. That never changes how a product is scored. Rankings reflect the criteria I use consistently across every brand I review — not who's paid for placement, because nobody has.