In August last year, for the first ever Sole Bloc sneaker festival in Glasgow, we were lucky enough to get our hands on some never before seen New Balance x Hanon samples for the NB Gallery display. So, before we get into this post, we suggest you take a look at the first post we wrote about the samples here, and then jump back to this one.

Since then, Thomas has started working at Hanon, and the other week, Murray of Hanon was lucky enough to get his hands on two pretty special samples, one of which was part of the “Flying Club” Pack, which was released back in 2008.

Obviously, knowing the excitable New Balance geek that Thomas is, Murray was kind enough to let me borrow his now prized possessions, and along with some other samples as well as the two released pairs, he put them together and created this post.

To kick off the post, we should take a brief look at the released pairs, so that you can compare them to the samples throughout the post.

The New Balance 670GKY “Tornado” features a grey suede upper, with dark grey Ventile fabric underlays, a kind of very dark navy leather heel tab and heel wrap, with yellow leather ‘N’, off-white midsole, and special “Flying Club” tongue tab.

The second released pair is the New Balance 670BRY “Spitfire”, which features a black suede upper, with red Ventile fabric underlays, and a black leather heel tab and heel wrap, yellow leather ‘N’, off-white midsole, and special “Flying Club” tongue tab.

For the first sample, let’s look at my favourite. The red 670 features a predominantly nubuck upper with Ventile fabric underlays, a charcoal leather heel wrap and heel tab, a normal 670 tongue tab, as well as a big grey suede ‘N’, and a grey midsole.

Next up are two samples which haven’t really been seen before, well, one hasn’t been seen at all, and some pics of the other surfaced a long time ago, and have been elsewhere until they turned up the other week.

I shot them both together so that it’s easier to see the slight differences between them. In terms of materials, they both have the same make up, but the colourways are slightly different.

The first pair was dubbed the “Lancaster” and is the pair that had some images of it floating around many years ago.

This next pair, I actually found when I was digging around the vaults for the red nubuck 670, I pulled out a random NB box and this was stashed inside, and as you can imagine, I was pretty chuffed to stumble across it.

Now that we’ve got the introduction to these two samples out the way, let’s get down to the side by side comparison.

As mentioned already, both pairs feature the same material make up, utilising suede overlays and Ventile fabric underlays, with a black leather heel wrap and heel tab, as well as the big yellow ‘N’s on both pairs, the “Flying Club” tongue tab, and off-white midsoles.

The “Lancaster” pair has lush brown suede with a lighter brown Ventile fabric underlay, while the other pair uses dark grey suede and an almost light tan Ventile fabric for the underlay. It’s really hard to choose a favourite between these two.

So in terms of the “Flying Club” Pack, that’s it for the samples, but you might have caught that there’s another pair featured in one of the very first images, and I wanted to include that in this post because it has a “Flying Club” tongue tab, although it has absolutely nothing to do with the pack, and features no Ventile fabric whatsoever.

This New Balance 1300 was another project that Hanon were working on some time ago, and never came to fruition for whatever reason, but it was very interesting seeing a UK Made 1300 almost being used for a collab. The shoe itself features a mixture grey nubuck and grey mesh underlays, with a burgundy suede ‘N’ and burgundy Terry Cloth lining.

I hope you enjoyed this exclusive look into some more Hanon Shop samples, but there’s a lot more where that came from, so stay tuned to my blog.

Until then, here’s one last picture of the four of them together…