Comeback time: The rebirth of British watchmaking
Bremont is the best-known current UK CREDIT: Bremont
You will have little trouble finding a luxury Swiss watch in London’s West End, where shops selling brands such as Rolex, Omega and Patek Philippe are commonplace.
But British-made timepieces are much harder to come by.
One of the few purveyors is Bremont, which has a boutique in the upmarket central London area of Mayfair.
Its mechanical watches sell for between £2,695 and £30,950, and are all designed and painstakingly assembled by hand in England.
It employs around 30 watchmakers at a workshop in the Oxfordshire town of Henley-on-Thames, and makes many of its own parts at a factory in Silverstone, Northamptonshire.
“The goal is to produce watches that you could put on in 20 to 30 years’ time and that will still look great,” says Nick English, Bremont’s co-founder. Marloe’s watches are made in China CREDIT: Gordon Fraser
“They are all hand wound, there are no automatic features, they are not quartz,” says founder Oliver Goffe. “To be honest we are trying to bring hand-wound watches back to the masses.”
The company, which only retails online, has sold 1,500 watches to date and expects to sell 5,000 next year.
Mr Goffe attributes the resurgence of British watches to the rise of craft culture more generally.
“It’s about people moving away from Sainsbury’s and Tesco and actually buying meat from their local butchers and cheese from the local de...
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