Manchester is renowned as the world’s first industrialized city — a hub of the Industrial Revolution in 18th-century Britain and home to more than a hundred textile factories at the time.
Today, that industrial focus has widened and, among its businesses, the sprawling metropolis of more than half a million residents has been making its mark as a watch city.
That will be particularly obvious on Saturday as the Manchester Watch Show makes its debut, drawing “watch enthusiasts from all over the north of England,” according to Hamish Robertson, the event’s organizer and the co-founder and chief executive of the Watch Collector’s Club in London. Thirty-five British watch brands are scheduled to exhibit at Hallé St Peter’s, an event hall northeast of the city center that is a home to the city orchestra.
Mr. Robertson said the event’s 300 tickets, at 12 pounds each (about $15), sold out in less than 24 hours. One of those buyers was Rob Kellner, 63, who lives in Manchester and, as “Rob the American,” talks watches to his roughly 1,960 YouTube subscribers.
During an interview at a local cafe, Mr. Kellner described himself as a collector who spends about £25,000 a year on watches from Rolex, Grand Seiko and other brands. On this particular day, he was wearing an IWC Schaffhausen Ingenieur Automatic 40 in stainless steel.
He initially saw it at the 2023 Watches and Wonders Geneva fair, but had to wait almost a year to buy one from David M. Robinson, a British watch retailer that has had a store in Manchester’s city center since 1979. (The model “was backlogged for a year after it was announced,” he wrote later in a WhatsApp message, “so at the time, you couldn’t walk in and buy one anywhere.”)
He said he would be going to the fair to examine — and maybe buy — watches “you don’t see everywhere.”
And, he added, there will be a bit of extra excitement: “It’s a watch show in Manchester. Usually the watch stuff is all in London.”
A Watch Heritage
Manchester’s watch heritage stretches back to the 1700s, when some residents were “making one-off pocket watches” in their homes, said James Robinson, the general manager of the British School of Watchmaking in Stockport, just southeast of Manchester.
“Like most industries, you get one or two people who start making something in an area and then an industry springs up around that, like the pottery industry springing up around Stoke-on-Trent,” Mr. Robinson said, referring to another industrial city, in the West Midlands. “In those days, they didn’t have transport, did they? So if someone is making a certain component down the road, it’s easy to make the other components close by. It’s not like now, when they can order from Amazon.”
“When you get to the Industrial Revolution and beyond that,” he said, “you started to get some of the bigger, more well-known English brands coming around.” Case in point: the sterling silver pocket watch made in Manchester about 1851 by Thomas and John Ollivant, which is on display at the Science and Industry Museum in the city.
The 19th century saw the establishment of several local watch companies, notably Hirst Brothers & Company in Oldham, northeast of Manchester. In 1912, it introduced the Limit brand of pocket watches, which housed Swiss movements in cases made in Birmingham, England.
According to Mr. Robinson, the Greater Manchester region boasts two great watchmakers: John Harwood, born in 1893, who invented the first self-winding, or automatic, watch; and Roger W. Smith, born in 1970 and now based on the Isle of Man, who completed his 100th handmade watch in 2021. He continues to inspire students who “want to learn how to make parts, how to hand finish parts,” Mr. Robinson said.
Showing Their Wealth
The economy of the Greater Manchester area, which comprises 10 districts including the cities of Manchester and Salford, has been growing: It was valued at £99.7 billion in 2022, up from £89.9 billion in 2021, according to Britain’s Office for National Statistics. So has the average disposable income of Manchester’s residents: £9,984 in 2022, up from £8,881 in 2020.
While Manchester’s wealth was initially derived from textiles and heavy industry, its growth today comes from very different sources.
“Now it’s sports, it’s media, it’s high growth tech companies and it’s the creative industries,” said Gordon Scott, the head of private banking in the north of England, Scotland and Northern Ireland at Brown Shipley, which specializes in wealth management. That diversification has put more wealth “in the hands of younger people than would have been the case 15 or 20 years ago,” he said in a video interview from the bank’s Manchester office.
All of which indicates that there is money in Manchester to be spent on luxury items such as watches.
“People like to show their wealth,” Mr. Scott said. “There’s a ‘go out’ society that exists here.” (He wears a black Links of London timepiece at work and, for occasions, an Omega Seamaster Aqua Terra watch that he bought for himself to mark his 30th wedding anniversary.)
Marcus Allen and Chris Horrocks, who run the local chapter of the global watch enthusiast group RedBar, have seen that social connection in their organization, too.
“It’s basically a group of anywhere between 20 and 80 people meeting in a bar and the thing that brought us all together is watches,” said Mr. Horrocks, 30, a session musician from nearby Wigan who was one of the people who founded the chapter in 2020. “But people talk about everything from music, what they do for a living, watches, sports.”
And Mr. Allen, 43, who lives in Salford and is a manager at a nuclear engineering company, noted that the chapter’s members represent a range of ages. “We’ve had 16 year olds who have come with parents, all the way up to 75,” he said.
The chapter has a 400-member mailing list, about 1,690 Instagram followers and quarterly events to share watches that, as Mr. Horrocks said, members “wouldn’t necessarily be exposed to.” Some of the most memorable have included a rare 42-millimeter titanium Rolex Yacht-Master and a Casio calculator watch that “every guy aged 40 and upward at the event wanted to see,” he said, because “it was what they had as a kid.”
Where to Shop
Watch brands have taken notice of Manchester’s growth, too.
“The whole marketplace has developed and professionalized and there has been a huge investment from brands and retailers into improving the quality of retailing,” said Rob Diver, TAG Heuer’s managing director for Britain and Ireland. “Many years ago when I started, you’d walk into what we would classify as a county jeweler and it hadn’t been refitted for probably 10 or 15 years; now stores are refitting probably every seven or eight years to improve the location.” He added that TAG Heuer’s store on St. Ann Street, one of Manchester’s main shopping thoroughfares, is scheduled to be renovated next year.
And Hublot has had a presence in Manchester since 2015. “Outside of London,” said Nick Callegari, the brand’s general manager for Britain and Ireland, “Manchester would be the next significant area for us in terms of performance.”
When it comes to the best watch shopping in Manchester, Mr. Horrocks and Mr. Allen agreed that it was in the St Ann’s area, with its cluster of multibrand retailers, including David M. Robinson, which sells Rolex and IWC, and monobrand boutiques such as TAG Heuer and Tudor. And the area’s best shop? Watches of Switzerland, they said.
However, a new AP House, an addition to Audemars Piguet’s global chain of hospitality-focused shops, is scheduled to open next year in a Georgian townhouse along King Street, near St Ann’s Square.
But the region’s best shopping environment is at Breitling in the Trafford Center mall, just west of the city. The store’s relaxed atmosphere and “the cool bar” make it “a bit more welcoming” than other stores, Mr. Allen said.
The St. Ann’s area also has several pre-owned watch shops, including their choice of Arthur Kay & Bro. But “for specialized vintage pieces,” Mr. Allen said, “you are looking at places outside Manchester really,” such as the Old Watch Shop in Southport, a 90-minute drive north.
Beyond Repairs
Chrontime, a repair center in Bolton, a town northwest of the city, has been creating its own spot in Manchester’s watch history.
A business founded in 2015 by Clive Walters, it now represents nine brands, including Oris, Duckworth Prestex and Junghans, as their official after-sales service center for mechanical watch repairs in Britain and Ireland.
Mr. Walters, 51, said he and his three employees have been repairing about 1,900 watches a year, but he expects that number to increase significantly as four of the nine brands only joined his roster in July. (The company also has two business-side employees.)
In addition to working on movements, the repair technicians may be found “fitting glasses or repairing a bracelet or fitting a dial and hands or repairing a crown or sizing a stem to the right size to fit,” Mr. Walters said during an interview at the company headquarters, a minimalist space on the top floor of an old building opposite the landmark 19th-century Bolton Parish Church.
He was wearing a 42-millimeter Titoni Seascoper 600 watch in a combination of stainless steel and a yellow gold coating. He said he owns watches from several of the brands that he works with, such as Titoni, and rotates their wear “for maybe two or three months at a time.”
In 2021, struggling to stay in business during the pandemic lockdowns, Mr. Walters expanded the company’s scope by buying a couple of Oris watches from the brand and renovating them for sale online as pre-owned. It is something the company has continued to do, as with the 45-millimeter Oris TT1 Chronograph, a 2012 automatic stainless steel and black plated model, now offered with a new black rubber strap for £1,250 on the Chrontime website.
Mr. Walters has been repairing watches in Bolton since 1991, initially working as an apprentice for TAG Heuer’s British division because, as he put it, he “wanted to get a trade.” When the luxury giant LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton bought TAG Heuer in 1999, he stayed on to work for its British watch and jewelry subsidiary until 2014.
As the company has already gone beyond just repairs, Mr. Walters has ambitious plans that include adding another well-established brand to his roster, which would require him to hire more people and move to a larger location in Bolton.
After all, as Mr. Allen said, “there’s room for growth in Manchester.”
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