Clockmakers' Museum

The Clockmakers Company first established a library collection in 1814, under the control of a library committee, in which Benjamin Lewis Vulliamy soon emerged as the most prominent figure, remaining so for several decades. Early meetings were held at Vulliamy's premises in Pall Mall, London but in 1817 the Company acquired a mahogany bureau and bookcase from Gillows of Lancaster and London, to house its growing collection, and this was established in an upper room in the Kings Head Tavern in Poultry, London, where the Company had its meetings from 1802 to 1851. From 1815, the collection had expanded from books to include horological exhibits, among which an early acquisition was a set of…

The collection on display includes rare horological portraits, and numbers some 660 English and European watches, 30 clocks, and 15 marine timekeepers, which are broadly arranged in chronological order, starting in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries at the east end (with some European objects), but soon moving to the seventeenth century and the emergence of a clock and watch trade in London, initially populated by immigrant craftsmen. The gallery moves forward in time as it progresses westwards through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and is completed at the west end by recent and current objects, such as watches made by and other items associated with George Daniels, a former…