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Horology — Around the World

Britain invented modern watchmaking and then watched it slip away. Now, from a one-man workshop on the Isle of Man to a manufacturing floor in Henley-on-Thames to a converted carpet factory in Glasgow, a generation of makers is quietly winning it back.

This is the fifth instalment of our Horology — Around the World series, following features on Canada, France, Norway, and the United States. Of all the countries in this series, the United Kingdom carries the heaviest horological legacy — and arguably the most poignant story of loss and recovery.

The British Isles were once the undisputed centre of global horology. In 1800, London alone produced more than half the world's timepieces. The inventions that made modern precision timekeeping possible — John Harrison's marine chronometer, Thomas Mudge's lever escapement, John Arnold's detent escapement, George Daniels' co-axial escapement — were British. Rolex itself was founded in London in 1905, before relocating to Geneva. The Royal Observatory at Greenwich defined the world's prime meridian. Time, in every practical sense, was a British invention.

Then, across the 20th century, it was gone. Two world wars diverted engineering capacity. Switzerland industrialised watchmaking with a precision that Britain could not match at scale. Japan's quartz revolution in the 1970s delivered the killing blow to what remained. The factories emptied. The apprenticeships ended. By 1980, British watchmaking had collapsed to a fraction of its former self — a few specialist firms, some military contract work, and a handful of restorers.

What exists today is more than a revival. It is, in places, a genuine resurrection of craft — and in others, something entirely new: a British-designed watch culture that has found its own voice, its own aesthetic, and its own reasons to exist. From the summit of independent haute horlogerie to the most accessible microbrands, the British watch scene in 2026 is more varied, more ambitious, and more alive than at any point in the past half-century.

The Standard Bearer: Roger W. Smith OBE

Roger W. Smith OBE · Isle of Man

There is no figure in contemporary British horology who occupies the position Roger Smith does. Working from a purpose-built workshop in the Manx countryside — inheritor of his mentor George Daniels' entire workshop collection, his tools, and his philosophy — Smith produces fewer than eighteen watches a year, each one made entirely by hand from sketch to finished movement, using what he and Daniels called the Daniels Method. He is the only watchmaker in the world who works this way. The watches are made to order. Some pieces take more than two years to build. The waiting list is accordingly long, and the prices reflect it — but the objects themselves exist in a different category from almost everything else called a wristwatch.

Smith's story begins in Bolton, Lancashire, where as a young man he taught himself to make a pocket watch from George Daniels' published book Watchmaking, then carried the finished piece to the Isle of Man for Daniels to inspect. Daniels rejected it — the watch "looked handmade, not created" — and Smith went home and spent five years remaking it until it earned Daniels' approval. That second pocket watch, with its one-minute tourbillon and perpetual calendar, sold at auction in 2023 for $4.9 million. The lesson of those five years — that perfection is the only acceptable standard — is visible in every Roger W. Smith watch produced since. His movements are finished in the classical English tradition: gilded three-quarter plates, hand-engraved baroque scrollwork, blued screws, gold chatons, and the Isle of Man triskelion engraved on the balance cock. His ongoing refinement of the co-axial escapement has produced service intervals far beyond industry norms. In 2018, Smith received an OBE for outstanding services to watchmaking. When Daniels died in 2011, he left his entire workshop to Smith. The inheritance was practical as well as symbolic: Smith is the direct continuation of a tradition of English watchmaking that stretches back to Tompion and Graham.

The Manufacturers: Industrial British Watchmaking Returns

Bremont Watch Company · Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire

Founded in 2002 by brothers Nick and Giles English — their surname authentic, their passion for aviation genuine, their ambition unambiguous — Bremont set out to accomplish something that had not been done at commercial scale in Britain for decades: make watches on British soil. Their father, a pilot and watch collector who died in a plane crash, was the direct inspiration. Two decades of investment later, Bremont has come closer than any other brand to fulfilling that ambition. Its Manufacturing & Technology Centre in Henley-on-Thames machines cases in-house, and in 2022 the company released the Longitude — a limited-edition dual-time watch housing its first entirely proprietary calibre, the ENG300, made in Britain. The movement incorporates a silicon escapement, a 65-hour power reserve, and an instantaneous digital date display; its caseback contains brass melted from the actual prime meridian line at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. It is the first serially produced British watch movement in modern horological memory. Bremont's collections draw on a deep well of British identity: military aviation (the MB series), WWII Spitfire heritage (the Supermarine), the Ministry of Defence (officially licensed military timepieces). In 2023, Bill Ackman's private equity fund took a majority stake in the company, and the English brothers stepped away from the board in 2025. Under new CEO Davide Cerrato, the brand's entry-level Terra Nova field watch has become its signature accessible piece. Whatever the ownership chapter, the Longitude's ENG300 movement stands as a landmark in British industrial watchmaking.

Garrick Watchmakers · Norfolk, England

Founded by David Brailsford and Simon Michlmayr, Garrick manufactures fine mechanical watches in its own dedicated facility in Norfolk, placing a deliberate emphasis on hand craftsmanship and individual character over the uniformity of automated production. The brand occupies a compelling mid-tier between the one-man artisan and the commercial manufacturer, producing open-dial and skeletonised watches that expose the movement as the primary design statement. In 2025, Garrick was named a finalist at the Grand Prix d'Horlogerie de Genève (GPHG) for its S3 deadbeat seconds — one of the very few British brands to reach that level of international recognition for movement innovation. Garrick's watches are not inexpensive, but for collectors who want genuine British manufacture with a horological rationale behind every design decision, there is little else at this price tier that competes on domestic ground.

"I like to think that we are operating at the level the British watch industry would have reached had its Golden Age never been interrupted."
— Roger W. Smith OBE

The Microbrands: A Distinct British Voice

British microbrands have developed something that distinguishes them from their American and Scandinavian counterparts: a recognisably British design sensibility. It tends towards restraint, historical reference, and colour used with intention rather than shock. The brands below are among the most distinctive expressions of that voice.

Christopher Ward · Maidenhead, Berkshire (designed in England; manufactured in Switzerland)

Christopher Ward — founded in 2004 during a brainstorming session on the River Thames by Mike France, Christopher Ward, and Peter Ellis — is widely credited with pioneering the direct-to-consumer watch model in Britain, and arguably worldwide. It was the first exclusively online luxury watch retailer, eliminating traditional retail margins at a time when selling expensive mechanical watches on the internet was considered commercially reckless. Twenty years later, the model has become industry-standard, and Christopher Ward has grown into one of Britain's most commercially significant watch brands, reporting £30.5 million in revenue in the fiscal year ending March 2024. In 2014, Christopher Ward merged with Swiss manufacturing partner Synergies Horlogères and released its first in-house movement, the Calibre SH21 — a five-day, COSC-certified automatic developed by master watchmaker Johannes Jahnke. It was described at the time as the most important development by a British watch brand in over fifty years. The flagship C1 Bel Canto, a striking musical-themed complication, and The Twelve sport collection exemplify the brand's current ambitions. Watches are designed in England and made in Switzerland, but the design identity — measured, confident, without Swiss pastiche — is unmistakably British.

anOrdain · Glasgow, Scotland

Founded in 2015 by designer Lewis Heath in Glasgow — the brand's name taken from Loch an Ordain, a remote lochan in the Scottish Highlands — anOrdain has built an international reputation on a single, deeply demanding craft: vitreous enamel dials, fired in-house using the grand feu technique. The process begins with a hand-cut copper disc coated in ground enamel powder, then fired at high temperature in a kiln; the work requires mastering more than 4,000 hours of technique, and the workshop produces only around eight dials per week. The dial typography, designed in-house, is inspired by vintage British Ordnance Survey maps. AnOrdain's fumé innovation — a smoked gradient effect across the enamel surface, a first in the industry — became the brand's signature and, for many collectors, the defining image of the current British watch revival. The waiting list has stretched into 2028. In recent years anOrdain has expanded by acquiring fellow Scottish brand Paulin Watches, and by moving into a larger Glasgow facility. The Model 1, Model 2, and Model 3 Method form the current core collection. Movements are Swiss (Sellita), but the soul of every anOrdain is in Glasgow, on a copper disc, in a kiln.

Fears Watch Company · Bristol, England

Fears is the oldest active watch name in Britain. Founded in Bristol in 1846 by Edwin Fear — when the city's Redcliff Street was alive with the industry of Victorian watchmaking — the company traded continuously until the quartz crisis forced it to close in 1976. In 2016, Nicholas Bowman-Scargill, the great-great-great-grandson of the founder, relaunched the brand at SalonQP and returned Fears to its home city. The decision to revive a 170-year-old family business rather than invent a new one says something about how seriously the British watch scene takes its own history. Fears' flagship Brunswick collection is built around a cushion-shaped case directly inspired by the 1920s Fears wristwatches that first replaced the firm's pocket watch heritage. Each watch is designed and built in the UK. Bowman-Scargill also co-founded the Alliance of British Watch & Clock Makers in 2020, a trade body with more than 70 members that funds horological education and promotes British watchmaking internationally. The Fears x Christopher Ward Alliance 01 collaboration — a limited-edition jump-hour in a Fears cushion case, powered by a Christopher Ward movement, with all profits going to the Alliance — sold out in hours. For a brand producing watches at modest volumes from a boutique in Bristol's Clifton Arcade, Fears punches considerably above its weight in horological significance.

Farer · Ascot, Berkshire (designed in London; made in Switzerland)

Founded in 2015 by Stuart Finlayson, Jono Holt, Ben Lewin, and Paul Sweetenham, Farer takes its name from the compound of “seafarer” and “wayfarer” and its design vocabulary from mid-century British exploration. Watch names reference George Mallory, Amy Johnson, John Cobb, and the ships HMS Beagle and HMS Endurance. The aesthetic proposition is unusual in British watchmaking: Farer uses colour more boldly than almost any of its contemporaries, with richly pigmented dials — warm lacquer tones, deep compressor blues, vivid sunray finishes — that would sit at home on a 1960s Italian sports watch. The brand is Swiss-made (produced by Roventa Henex in Bielle), with Sellita and Dubois-Dépraz calibres powering its GMT and chronograph collections respectively. At its price point, Farer consistently delivers specification and finishing that compares well with watches costing considerably more. It is one of the clearest examples of British design culture expressing itself through Swiss manufacture — and doing so with genuine confidence.

Other British brands worth knowing include Anoma (an ambitious newcomer generating significant collector interest), Schofield (Brighton-based tool watches with a purist, no-embellishment philosophy), Studio Underd0g (playful, affordable, fiercely independent), Spinnaker (nautical-themed dive watches at accessible entry prices), and William Wood (watches incorporating reclaimed fire engine components, with a portion of sales donated to firefighting charities).

Why Britain's Watchmaking Scene Matters

No country in this series has a deeper claim on the history of timekeeping. No country has fallen further from its former horological position. And no country's current watch scene is quite so varied in its response to that inheritance — from Roger Smith treating every watch as a research project in classical English craft, to Bremont investing millions in the infrastructure of industrial domestic manufacture, to anOrdain hand-firing enamel in a converted Victorian carpet factory in Glasgow, to Fears carrying a 178-year-old family name back into production from a boutique in Bristol.

Unlike Switzerland, Britain has no protected labelling standard for domestic manufacture. Unlike America, it has no FTC standard pushing makers to define what "Made in Britain" even means. The Alliance of British Watch & Clock Makers is working to change that — to give consumers a reliable signal and give makers a benchmark to aspire to. That institutional work matters, but the energy driving the revival is something less regulated and more human: a community of makers, collectors, and enthusiasts who believe that the country that gave the world the marine chronometer, the co-axial escapement, and Greenwich Mean Time still has something original to say about how a watch should be made.

Roger Smith, working alone on the Isle of Man, has said that he believes his watches operate at the level the British industry would have reached had its Golden Age never been interrupted. That is a remarkable claim. What makes it credible is not confidence but evidence — in the engraving on a balance cock, in the service intervals of a co-axial escapement refined over thirty years, in a pocket watch that sold for $4.9 million because a collector understood what it represented. The Golden Age did not end cleanly. It went underground, carried forward by individuals too stubborn, too precise, and too passionate to let it disappear entirely. In 2026, those individuals are joined by more company than at any point in living memory. The British watch scene will not recover its 19th-century volume. But it may, quietly and painstakingly, recover its reputation for being the best.

Horology — Around the World