The Coventry Watchmakers’ Heritage Trail
£6.75
This walk covers a substantial part of the earlier watchmaking centres of Spon End and Chapelfields. Unfortunately, owing to limitations of time and distance it ignores the suburb of Earlsdon with its roots in the watchmaking trade, and other important sites.
Description
The sites chosen for the placing of the first twenty plaques on the Coventry Watchmakers’ Trail not only celebrated the variety of skills associated with the watch trade but also commemorated the lives of some of the workers, recognising the importance of the more lowly journeymen workers as well as some of the more prosperous and well known names. In choosing the sites it was felt that it was important to reflect as many skills as possible in the choice of premises and so the walk takes the former workshops of dial painters, casemakers and jewellers as well as the larger premises of Smiths (balance makers) and the more famous names such as Williamson, Bonniksen and Rotherham. Sadly some of the sites originally included have subsequently been demolished or changed and the plaques removed.
