Seth Kennedy standing in the centre of his workshop holding a watch part, the upright straight-line engine to his left and the rose engine to his right.

Horology

The making and keeping of mechanical time, recorded hand by hand.

Horology is the making and keeping of mechanical time - the watch, the clock, the instruments that measure it, and the hands that repair them. England wrote much of the early history of the discipline and now holds only a thin line of people who still do its hardest work by hand.

This pillar gathers them one at a time. It opens with Seth Kennedy, a watchmaker and engine turner near Much Hadham who cuts watch cases and turns guilloché on a rose engine - one of very few in the country working this way. As the archive documents more of the trade - case makers, movement finishers, clock restorers, the people who keep the instruments running - their pages join him here.

In this pillar

The People Documented

The pillar grows one shoot at a time. The crafts the archive intends to document next - case makers, movement finishers, clock restorers - sit on the pipeline.

See what’s coming →