For most of the twentieth century, British watchmaking was, for practical purposes, dead. The last great London firms — Smiths, Garrard, Vertex — had closed, been absorbed, or moved offshore. The horology school at Hackney was shut. The trade had collapsed in the post-war years, unable to compete with Swiss volume or, later, Japanese quartz. By the 1990s, the British watchmaking tradition existed only in two places: in the V&A's display cases, and in the workshop of one man on the Isle of Man — Dr George Daniels, who in 1974 had built the entire Space Travellers' Watch alone, the first wristwatch made entirely in Britain in over a century, and the first to use his own co-axial escapement.
The renaissance
Daniels's apprentice Roger W. Smith took over the Isle of Man workshop after his master's death in 2011. He continued to make watches one at a time — fewer than a dozen a year, each requiring nearly two thousand hours of hand work, each costing more than $200,000 — and quietly trained the next generation. But the larger British revival came from elsewhere. Around 2007, a small wave of new firms began appearing, most run by ex-City professionals, designers, and amateur watchmakers who had been forced to teach themselves the craft because there was no British school left to attend.
"There is no British watch industry left to apprentice to. So you teach yourself. You make mistakes. You make better mistakes. Eventually, you make a watch." — Mike France, Christopher Ward
The houses, at a glance
- Roger W. Smith (Isle of Man) — the inheritor of George Daniels's tradition. The Series 2, hand-built, sub-twelve-pieces-per-year, is the holy grail of contemporary British horology. Waiting list: closed.
- Bremont (Henley-on-Thames, 2007) — founded by the English brothers Nick and Giles English, named for a French farmer who put them up after an emergency landing. Now makes its own movements in a new manufactory at the Wing in Henley.
- Christopher Ward (Maidenhead, 2004) — Britain's largest, selling direct-to-consumer. The C60 Trident dive watch and C12 Twelve made the firm one of the most respected in the affordable mechanical space.
- Fears (Bristol, 1846 / 2016) — Nicholas Bowman-Scargill resurrected his family's nineteenth-century Bristol watchmaking firm in 2016. The Brunswick is a perfect cushion-cased dress watch.
- Garrick (Norfolk, 2014) — David Brailsford makes hand-finished watches with the highest level of in-house movement work outside of Switzerland. Genuine bespoke commissions; tiny output.
- Studio Underd0g (London, 2020) — Richard Benc's irreverent, colour-soaked chronographs. Sold out the moment they list. Genuinely beloved by the under-forty collector demographic.
- Anordain (Glasgow, 2014) — Scottish enamel dials, made by Lewis Heath in the only contemporary British workshop producing grand feu enamel at scale.
The question of what counts as British
The Alliance of British Watch and Clock Makers, founded in 2020, has worked steadily toward a formal definition. The Swiss have spent decades policing what may carry the "Swiss Made" stamp; the British have, so far, mostly relied on common sense. A watch designed, assembled, regulated, and tested in Britain — even with a Swiss base movement — passes the smell test. A watch with a printed Union Jack on the dial and a Chinese movement does not. The line will, sooner or later, need to be drawn formally.
What is not in dispute is that British watchmaking, after a century in the wilderness, is meaningfully alive again. There are apprenticeships. There is a school — the British School of Watchmaking, opened in Manchester in 2006. There is, for the first time in living memory, a national pipeline.