Clerkenwell

The Survey of London notes that Clerkenwell’s trades grew from the City’s northern edges, where fine metal-working in gold and brass, furniture- and instrument-making had long thrived.¹

The trade’s guild stayed in the City. The Clockmakers’ Company, chartered on 22 August 1631, governed clockmakers in the City of London and for ten miles around; it has never had a hall of its own, and in its early years met in taverns or rented rooms.^6, 7

Nor were the seventeenth-century masters Clerkenwell men: Tompion and Graham worked in Fleet Street, and the Huguenot watchmakers who fled France after 1685 settled mainly in Soho, by the Victoria County History’s account.^2, 8

The Survey of London finds Clerkenwell makers from about 1720: a clockmaker, John Maberly, among the early residents of Red Lion Street, and Christopher Pinchbeck, watchmaker and deviser of the alloy that bears his name, working close by until 1721.¹

Watchmaking suited small houses. The Survey says it broke down into separate crafts that could be done in a room or behind a house, and that the outwork system, with each craftsman self-employed, dominated from early days, leaving the typical artisan independent but poor.¹

From the early eighteenth century Clerkenwell was the great centre of the working trade, the Victoria County History says, with streets almost wholly given to escapement makers, engine turners, fusee cutters, springers, secret-springers, finishers and joint finishers.^2, 9

The London Tradesman of 1747 describes how it worked: the movement-maker had his wheels cut by a cutter, springs and chains came from tradesmen who made nothing else, a gilder gilded the brass and a finisher completed the movement, yet the name on the plate was the watchmaker’s, though he had made none of its parts.^1, 9

The Survey of London records an estimate of 1797: almost 7,000 of Clerkenwell’s 21,000 or so people worked in or depended on the watch and clock trades, making 70,000 timepieces a year for export and 50,000 for home, and three makers each claimed over 3,000 a year.¹

Counts of output differ. Against that estimate of 120,000, the historian Alun Davies puts Clerkenwell at almost 200,000 watches a year in the 1790s, and the Victoria County History cites 191,678 watch cases assayed at Goldsmiths’ Hall in 1796, many perhaps cheap watches with forged names.^1, 2, 3

The trade left marks on houses: in Britton Street several old houses keep attic ‘watchmaker’ windows, and Northampton Square, laid out in 1802, had watch-case makers from its early years and watchmakers at three of its houses around 1840.^{10, 11, 12}

Movements came in from the north: by the late eighteenth century rough movements from Lancashire, around Prescot, were finished in London.^3, 9

Clerkenwell also made marine chronometers for the Greenwich trials. Royal Museums Greenwich counts Thomas Mercer, who set up there in 1858 and moved to St Albans in 1874, among the most prolific makers of the later nineteenth century.¹⁴

In the early 1840s the Swiss watchmaker Pierre-Frédéric Ingold, born in Biel and once with Breguet in Paris, tried to found a company in London to make watches by machine. Alun Davies writes that Clerkenwell’s outworkers united against it, that some broke the windows of the planned works, and that the bill to establish it was defeated in Parliament.^3, 15

Accounts of Ingold differ. Davies dates the episode 1842–43, says Ingold died in the early 1870s and had no connection with later American factories; the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland dates the London attempt 1839–42, his death to 1878 in La Chaux-de-Fonds, and says factories with his machines opened in the United States, where he worked from 1845 to 1852.^3, 15

Cheap Swiss watches, with a going barrel in place of the fusee, came in first by smuggling and, after tariffs fell from 1850, by the million; American factory watches followed after 1858. Davies writes that Clerkenwell’s craftsmen at first dismissed the Waltham imports with contempt, but that by 1880 an American worker with a punch could blank about 10,000 wheels a day while Clerkenwell still cut them by hand.³

The trade answered with the British Horological Institute, proposed on 15 June 1858 at the Belvedere Tavern in Clerkenwell to raise the craft against foreign competition; it settled in Northampton Square in 1860 and rebuilt its premises there in 1879.^{11, 16, 17}

The Survey of London dates the fall after 1870, before lower Swiss wages and American mechanization; by 1895 there were headlines about ‘a dead industry’, and Clerkenwell watchmaking survived increasingly as repair work.¹

Davies writes that by 1914 British makers supplied less than a tenth of the home market for watches, while imports rose from 2.5 to 4.5 million a year between 1907 and 1914.³

The Survey of London records that the Northampton Institute in St John Street, built in 1894–98 partly to serve the local clock and watch trades, is now the headquarters of City University, with a tower clock by E. Dent & Co.^1, 11

In 1972 the British Horological Institute left its bomb-damaged Clerkenwell premises for Upton Hall in Nottinghamshire.¹⁶

What remains is protected as townscape: the surviving Northampton Square houses were listed in 1972 and the square became a conservation area in 1990, and Islington’s guidelines for the Clerkenwell Green conservation areas call specialist craft and light industrial workshops traditional to Clerkenwell.^{11, 12, 19}

The Clockmakers’ Company kept its collection in the City: Wikipedia records that the museum begun in 1813 was at Guildhall from 1874 to 2014 and is now shown at the Science Museum.⁷