Hands-on – Speake-Marin London Chronograph – Rule Britannia and Valjoux 92!
Fitted with a refurbished Valjoux 92 Calibre from the 1960s, Speake-Marin’s London Chronograph pays tribute to the English soul of the brand and flaunts some dandy design tweaks on the dial. Originally released in 2016 in a hyper-limited edition of just 3 pieces, Speake-Marin revisits the London Chronograph in 2018 in another limited edition of 15 watches. A winning combination of classic watchmaking elements, quirky design choices and a vintage movement make the London Chronograph a very fetching and practically unique model.
Chris Alexander, also known as Creo Design, is a professional artist and designer who has worked across multiple media, with a focus for watch dial art. Hi Chris, what’s your daily watch and why? An Omega Speedmaster Pro 3570.50. This watch means an awful lot to me even though it has only been in my possession for about three months. The story goes way back to when I was around 4-5 years old and spending time with my late father. He was a qualified astrophysicist and taught me all he knew about space. And the clearest and fondest memory I have of him was spending hours looking at the moon and hearing about all the facts and statistics. My father was also a keen horologist and collected several clocks and tinkered away with them in his spare time. Fast-forward 30 years, and I found myself falling in love with watches all over again while painting them. My appreciation for horology was of a keen outsider — someone who admires them in a store window but never purchased. So spending a lot of money on a watch just didn’t make sense to me until I started working on them. Then it all made sense,…
Editor’s note: Speculation that Big Idris Elba might be the next man to don the Tom Ford tux and strap on the Walther and take over from Daniel Craig as the next Bond has once again reared its head, and honestly this is something we can all get behind (side note, Esquire’s suggestion of Thandie Newton also has serious merit). So we thought we’d revisit this piece on possible Bond watches. Q would be proud. Given his extraordinarily good taste in watches in real life we would love to be a fly on the wall at Omega the day Elba arrives to discuss 007’s next wristwatch of choice… The Globemaster Bond attends a large number of black tie events, casinos, gala openings, secret cabalistic meetings – you know, the usual. These occasions can degenerate into brawls and/or gun fights without a moment’s notice, which necessitates a watch that works just as well with a bow tie as it does a submachine gun. Tricky. Our suggestion would be the Globemaster. While dressy, it’s not fussily so, particularly in the steel model with tungsten carbide bezel, which would defend itself well against dings or scratches caused by hapless henchmen. The Ploprof 1200M The odds are…
It might surprise you to know that in the first half of the last century, America was regarded as the force to be reckoned with when it came to watches — especially modern, efficient and mass-produced watches. But now, with great legacy brands like Waltham and Illinois consigned to the scrapheap of history, while others, like Hamilton, are part of larger Swiss portfolios, the American watch industry is a shadow of its former self. But that’s not to say that the land of the free and the home of the brave is entirely bereft of local timekeeping concerns. Here are five brands keeping the faith, though it must be mentioned that in most cases the heavy lifting of manufacturing is done off shore. Weiss American Issue Field Watch A few years ago the American Federal Trade Commission tightened up on ‘American Made’, dictating that to be eligible it wasn’t good enough for a product to be assembled in the States, it had to be manufactured there too. Few American watch brands can live up to that claim. Weiss is one of them. The Cal 1003 movement in the American Issue Field Watch is machined, assembled and finished in Los Angeles.…
