The workshop
A converted coach house in Ashcombe Vale: one bench long enough for six instruments, two lathes, and a test stand that never sleeps.
The building came with the beam. A single oak joist, older than the house, runs the length of the shop floor, and the test stand is cut from it. Everything else was built around what the room allowed: the lathes sit where the light is steadiest, the bench runs under the north window, and the visit room is the old tack room, kept deliberately small.
Six people work here. That number has not changed since the 1960s, and it is not nostalgia; it is capacity. Six makers can each take one instrument a year and still have time to answer the door, teach a file-hand, and write in the log. A seventh would either make the work worse or make the waiting list shorter, and the drawings say no.
We keep no secrets worth keeping. The drawings hang on the wall where any visitor can read them, the rate logs sit open on the stand, and the only thing behind a lock is Ambrose's original key cutter, which is still in service and still fussy.
The workshop dial
House dates
- 1908
Ambrose Halloway, a clockmaker's apprentice with a rented lathe, finishes the first Meridian No. 1 in the coach house and sells it to a shipping family who wanted the stars without the fog.
- 1911
After a visitor strips a great wheel with a borrowed key, every winding square in the house becomes left handed. The standard has not moved since.
- 1922
The pattern for the Heliotrope sun is cut. It has been recast eleven times, always from the same brass, always by two makers.
- 1931
Vesta Nine enters the drawings with its proudly wrong comet period, set so a visitor can watch a full return in eight minutes.
- 1954
The test stand grows to ten clamps. The rate log opens volume one; it is on volume nineteen.
- 1987
Edith Marlowe starts as an apprentice file-hand. She has been master of the house since 2009.
- 2026
The bench takes two commissions a year. The waiting list is honest: about twelve months.
The stand
Ten clamps, one beam, eighteen weeks per instrument. Every model runs here before it ships, and the rate log is kept in ink.
The visit room
Four chairs, one model on the stand, and as much winding as you like. Open three afternoons a week.
The archive
Every instrument leaves with a provenance card, and we keep the carbon copy. Owners write; we answer from the file.