Places

The towns, valleys and industrial centres that shaped watchmaking, and why it took root there: what grew in each place, who and what moved through it, and what it changed.

• Augsburg

  The free imperial city in Swabia that, with Nuremberg, led south German clock and watchmaking from about 1550 to 1650, under a guild whose masterpiece rules produced astronomical table clocks, and whose makers built automata for the courts of Europe.

• Bangalore

  The south Indian city where the state’s machine-tool company opened India’s watch factories with Citizen’s help in the 1960s, made mechanical and quartz watches and cases there, closed them after 2016, and keeps the HMT museum, Titan’s offices and a few new watchmakers.

• Besançon

  The city near the Swiss border where watchmakers from Le Locle and Neuchâtel founded a French watch industry in 1793; by 1866 it made 98% of France’s gold and silver watches, and its observatory certified chronometers from 1885.

• Biel/Bienne

  A German-speaking town at the foot of the Jura that invited French-speaking watchmakers in 1842, grew into a city of watch factories, Omega and Rolex's movement works among them, and became the seat of the Swatch Group.

• Blois

  A royal town on the Loire whose watchmakers, many of them Protestant, made engraved and then enamelled watches in the 17th century, some of them for the court; the trade shrank in the later 17th century, after the death of Gaston d'Orléans in 1660 and the Revocation of 1685, as Huguenot makers left.

• Clerkenwell

  The district just north of the City of London where, from the eighteenth century, London’s watches were made by specialist outworkers in small houses and back workshops, until Swiss and American factory watches overtook them after 1870.

• Coventry

  The Midlands city that became England’s third watch centre, finishing Lancashire movements in the workshops of Spon Street, Chapelfields and Earlsdon; its trade peaked between 1830 and 1850, its largest firm was Rotherham & Sons, and its skills passed to cycles, cars and instruments.

• Elgin, Illinois

  A Fox River town northwest of Chicago where Chicago investors and men from Waltham built the National Watch Company’s factory in 1866–67; it became the town’s great employer, timed its watches by its own observatory from 1910, and was torn down in 1966.

• Geneva

  The Swiss city where Protestant refugees built a watch trade from the mid-16th century, finishing and selling watches whose movements were made in the valleys of the Jura.

• Glashütte

  A small town in the eastern Ore Mountains of Saxony, south of Dresden, where watchmaking began in 1845 as a state-backed answer to the decline of mining.

• Greenwich

  The hill above the Thames where Charles II put a Royal Observatory in 1675 to find longitude at sea: the place that tested the Navy’s chronometers, sent Greenwich time out by time ball, telegraph and railway, and in 1884 became the zero of the world’s longitude.

• Grenchen

  A village at the foot of the Jura in the canton of Solothurn that took up watchmaking in 1851 and became the town of ébauche factories, home of Eterna, A. Schild and ETA, and where the Swatch is made.

• Hong Kong

  The British colony that traded Swiss and Japanese watches into Asia, made cases and straps from the 1930s, assembled mechanical and then electronic watches for the world’s makers from the 1960s, and from the mid-1980s moved its factories across the border into the Pearl River Delta.

• Hosur

  The town in Tamil Nadu, about 40 kilometres from Bangalore, where Titan built an integrated watch factory and a township in the 1980s, made quartz watches by the million, and now makes mechanical movements of its own.

• La Chaux-de-Fonds and Le Locle

  Two neighbouring watch towns in the Neuchâtel mountains, rebuilt after fires on plans of long parallel strips where homes and workshops stood side by side, inscribed together by UNESCO in 2009 as watchmaking town planning.

• London

  The city where the English watch trade grew up around the Clockmakers’ Company of 1631: Tompion, Graham and Mudge in Fleet Street, Huguenot and Genevan immigrants, and by the 1790s a Clerkenwell industry making close to 200,000 watches a year.

• Moscow

  The capital where the Soviet watch industry began in 1930, with the First State Watch Factory on American machinery and the Second State Watch Factory beside it, and where the industry’s research institute stood; its factories were evacuated in 1941, made Pobeda and Poljot watches after the war, and stopped making watches after 1991.

• Neuchâtel

  The lakeside capital of a watchmaking canton, where the state founded an observatory in 1858 to give the watch towns exact time and rate their chronometers, and where the industry's shared laboratories built the Swiss quartz wristwatch.

• Nuremberg

  The Free Imperial City in Franconia where locksmiths were making small spring-driven clocks to carry by 1511: home of Peter Henlein, and of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, which holds the Burgundy clock and the disputed 'Henlein watch'.

• Paris

  The capital of French watchmaking in the eighteenth century: a guild trade clustered on the Île de la Cité around the Quai de l’Horloge, under royal patronage and beside the Académie des sciences, the Observatory and the Bureau des Longitudes.

• Pforzheim

  A city in Baden, between Stuttgart and Karlsruhe, called the Goldstadt for its jewellery and watch industry.

• Prescot

  A small Lancashire town near Liverpool that made most of England’s rough watch movements and many of its watchmaking tools in the 18th and 19th centuries, finished in London and Coventry; its trade collapsed after the 1870s, and the Lancashire Watch Company’s factory of 1889 could not save it.

• Ruhla

  A small metalworking town in the Thuringian Forest where the Thiel brothers’ works made cheap machine-made pocket watches from the 1890s, and which led East Germany’s watch combine, making everyday watches by the million, until reunification.

• Schaffhausen

  A Rhine town in northern Switzerland, outside the Jura watch country, where Heinrich Moser’s dam of 1866 gave power to industry and the American Florentine Ariosto Jones founded the International Watch Company in 1868.

• Shanghai

  China’s great industrial city, where imported movements were cased before 1949, where 58 clockmakers and repairers built jewelled-lever watches by hand in 1955, and where the Shanghai Watch Factory made the watch of the planned economy, the Shanghai, from 1958.

• Shenzhen

  The city on the Hong Kong border, a special economic zone from 1980, to which Hong Kong’s watch firms moved their assembly from the late 1980s, and which its industry association and state media describe as the source of over 40 per cent of the world’s watches.

• Suwa

  The lake town in Nagano where a parts workshop of 1942 and Seiko’s wartime evacuation plant became Suwa Seikosha, which made the Marvel, the Quartz Astron and, by Grand Seiko’s account, the Grand Seiko of 1960, and is now Seiko Epson.

• The Black Forest

  The upland of south-west Germany where wooden clocks were made from the eighteenth century and carried across Europe by peddlers, where Schramberg and Schwenningen became centres of factory clockmaking on the American model, and where quartz and competition from the Far East ended most of the trade in the late twentieth century.

• The Jura Arc

  The arc of the Jura mountains along Switzerland’s border with France, from the Vallée de Joux through the Neuchâtel mountains and Saint-Imier to Biel/Bienne and Grenchen, where most of the Swiss watch industry has worked since the nineteenth century.

• Tianjin

  The northern port city where a trial group of four watch repairers built the Five Star watch in 1955, whose watch factory made the air force chronograph of the 1960s and the Dongfeng, and where its successor, Sea-Gull, now makes mechanical movements and complicated watches near the airport.

• Tokyo

  The capital where Japan’s watch trade began: Ginza’s import dealers and clock towers, Hattori’s Seikosha factory across the river, Citizen’s and Orient’s early workshops, and the head offices that still run the industry.

• Vallée de Joux

  A high valley of the Vaud Jura where farming families made watch parts through the winter and a few dynasties, the Audemars, LeCoultre, Meylan and Piguet among them, became makers of complicated movements; Audemars Piguet and Jaeger-LeCoultre still work there.

• Waltham, Massachusetts

  A mill town on the Charles River west of Boston, already home to a large textile corporation, where the watch factory built on the empty South Side in 1854 laid out streets, housed and employed much of the town, earned it the name Watch City, and left a factory that still stands.

• Waterbury, Connecticut

  Connecticut’s Brass City, where button and brass makers on the Mad and Naugatuck rivers turned to clocks and cheap watches: the Waterbury watch, the Ingersoll dollar watch and the company that, after leaving the city in 1944, made the Timex.