The Road Through Britain: Somlo Antiques

I've been a watch dealer for 46 years. My passion has always been antique pocket watches, but through the advent of people collecting wristwatches, I also got involved with that. Most antique pocket watch dealers, when we first started to see wristwatches, we didn't think it was a market that was actually going to succeed. We thought, well, they're not that special to start with. They were only made 50 years ago or 60 years ago. Everything that you see in a wristwatch has already happened in a pocket watch. Obviously, it was a mistake on my part. My move to the Burlington Arcade started with my association with Amiga. It was Mr. Hayek who went down the Burlington Arcade and he did not see an Amiga in anybody's window. He was a little upset about that. He saw Patek Philippe. He saw Rolexes, but there was nobody selling Amigas. Mr. Hayek thought, well, maybe it would be an idea to get somebody within London involved who we could actually form an association to promote vintage Amiga. They made a lot of watches, so I was never going to be really short of stock. The reason these watches are still in existence is because they were so well made. I thought, well, I think this is a company that's worth getting involved with. It was nearly 10 years ago that we opened up the shop. We are supported by Amiga. We are supported by their museum. Any questions that we have, all we have to do is pick up a phone and ask them. We have an Amiga-sponsored watchmaker within the premises, so every watch that we have, we overhaul and clean. This is actually something which I'm very reluctant to sell. It's a mission case. Amiga produced 40 of these to commemorate all different missions, from the Gemini to the Apollo to the Skylab. They made this case with 23 watches in there. 22 are mission watches, and they all have the little mission symbols on the dial. The 23rd watch is a replica of the original Speedmaster from 1957. I particularly like English pocket watches. England was very famous, really, until the very late 19th century in the watch industry. Names like Thomas Tompion. The one I have has a gold case, a gold dial. It has all the original hands. From Tompion's records, the movement was made around the 1680s, so it's one of his very early hairsprings. His apprentice, George Graham, invented the cylinder watch. The watch is dated, I think, 1727. Breguet invented the tourbillon watch. The English watchmakers did a very good job on it as well. I have a tourbillon watch from Smith. You see tourbillons in modern wristwatches, but really all they are doing is copying what was in the past. I'm very passionate about English watchmakers. To see that competing against the world of mostly Switzerland is an incredible achievement. To compete with the finance of Patek Philippe, Rolex, is just to me an amazing achievement. To see these English watchmakers working the way they are working, making amazingly good looking watches, I'm proud to be English.