Monday 7 January 2019

FEATURE: Another Day Out in London...

As I wrote in my last post, my experience of owning the Grand Carrera GMT has not been all that I hoped and since I can’t really afford to just sit on a watch like that in the hope that one day I’ll change my mind, I decided to part exchange it with Watchfinder for a couple of watches that I will wear.

Watchfinder's central London store is in Avery Row (off New Bond St)

Of course I could have posted the watch to them, but since taking it in myself meant I could see my new watches (although I couldn’t have them until my watch has been checked out) and gave me an excuse to spend a day in London, well that seemed like a sound idea to me.

So I rocked up at Watchfinder first thing (with my wife in tow) and dropped off the Calibre 8 GMT, and I have to say I am super happy with the new additions that are coming. Both of them look way better than the pictures led me to believe and one of them looks absolutely mint, so that was an excellent start to my day.

The Wonder Room in Selfridges

Next stop was Selfridges, which was somewhat underwhelming if I’m honest. They have a reasonable collection of TAG pieces in there I guess, and I was excited to see the new Carrera Twin Time and to try it on – but there was no one manning the TAG stand so I wandered off figuring that by the time I got back there someone would have shown up.

Amazing hand-finished 'Frosted Gold' AP Royal Oak

I had a look at some of the (rather gaudy) Hublots and my wife was drooling over the ‘frosted gold’ Audemars Piguet Royal Oaks (though she definitely can’t afford one of those), but actually there wasn’t that much that was blowing me away. Audemars Piguet’s stand seems rather sparsely stocked and seems rather too heavily weighted towards solid gold pieces.

CBG2A1Z.FT6157

Returning to the TAG stall there was still no one there, so I nabbed the man on the Longines stall who quickly came over and showed me the watch. It’s a nice watch, but if I was looking to spend that kind of money I think I’d want a bit better customer service than that to be honest.


A short step over the road is the TAG Heuer boutique and regular readers will remember that my first visit there was less than stellar. Quite different this time though, I’m happy to report. Evan single-handedly restored my faith in the Oxford Street store and was very friendly and happy to show me several watches including the carbon Carrera, the new Max Verstappen Formula 1, the Mikropendulum and the Oxford Street Limited Edition Carrera. I also spied the new Alec Monopoly Formula 1 (which looks better in the flesh than I expected) and the Tete de Vipere Tourbillon Carrera in there and also another unknown Formula 1 quartz with two red stripes down one side of the dial (I’m trying to get to the bottom of this*). I also had a good look at Evan’s own matt ceramic Carrera, which was very nice indeed and a great choice – no fingerprints on the matt ceramic!

TAG Heuer Mikropendulum

Leaving there (reluctantly – my wife was hungry) we headed back down Bond Street to ‘Richoux’ on Piccadilly, via Charbonnel et Walker to pick up some posh chocolates. I love C&W but I had to laugh when I saw on the receipt that their ‘pick and mix’ chocolates are £95 per kilo. Wow, that’s about 5 times the price of Lindt!

Burgers and awesome carrot cake consumed, we caught the tube to Kensington and walked around to the far end of Harrods for easy access to the watch room. Last time I visited Harrods the watch room was in a state of flux, but now it’s complete (although I’m sad to say that the Richard Mille boutique has disappeared) and slap bang in the middle of it there’s a very impressive 15ft high model of a Lange and Sohne split time, complete with display back! Impressive stuff.

Lange and Sohne Split Time model display.

We headed for the Hublot store and I have to say the watches in there were a lot nicer than the ones we saw in Selfridges. In fact my wife was rather taken with the ceramic ‘Black Magic’ range, the simplest of which cost about £7,000 and looked absolutely fantastic. In fact I think that might have superceded the TAG Heuer Link Bella Hadid as my wife’s dream watch!

This Hublot is really, really nice!

There were quite a few very nice pieces in there, including the Big Bang Unico Sapphire and also the Spirit of Big Bang Sapphire, both of which are incredible to look at, if way out of my price range. They also had a pink sapphire Unico as well and a ladies version with diamonds and a pink rubber strap, all at crazy prices – but still a lot cheaper than a sapphire Richard Mille to be fair.

Hublot Big Bang Unico Sapphire

They also had the Ferrari skeleton watches and the Depeche Mode watch too, and actually quite a few really nice pieces – and also some really weird ones with dials that look a bit like pentagrams… I’m not a fan of those, they seem awfully hard to read the time on them for a start.

Moving on we wandered into the Roger Dubuis store. I remember the first time we went in there we saw the ‘King Arthur’ watch (and several other very impressive pieces), but this time I somehow ended up trying on a watch that cost £137,000. Oddly enough, on leaving TAG Heuer I said to my wife that the Mikropendulum (£33,000) had taken over from the Royal Oak ‘Vampire’ as the most expensive watch I’d ever tried on, well that didn’t last very long!


The lady in the store asked me if I knew the brand and I said I did, but I wasn’t pretending to be a customer… however, the conversation led to me pointing to a Excalibur Spider Tourbillon and before you could say ‘this cost more than I paid for my house fifteen years ago’ I was slipping off my quartz 6000 Series (£300 from eBay no less!) and trying my best to hide it in plain sight on the tray in front of me.

It’s a cool watch right enough, but I can’t say with my hand on my heart that I’m gutted that I can’t afford it. I guess it’s so far out of reality that in a way there’s just no point wanting it, because I’m never going to get it, but while I do like Roger Dubuis watches I can’t help feeling it should have been a bit more affecting…. the white rubber strap seemed a little grubby as well!

The Fine Watch Multi-brand Room in Harrods

We had a quick scoot around the multi-brand showroom at the end of the corridor, but there wasn’t really anything particularly inspiring in there. Though having said that, some of the new Zeniths are pretty nice. I also spied a pre-owned Heuer Monaco in there (with the round pushers) which I believe was going for £19,000 or so. Not my cup of tea if I’m honest, but I’m sure some people would be well impressed with that.

Karl Lagerfeld Handbag

And that was pretty much it to be honest, we had a look in Karl Lagerfeld’s store on Regent Street, Superdry and Kate Spade and then made our way back to the train station. Definitely a day to remember, and I can’t wait to take delivery of my two new watches!

WAZ1116

*Turns out that mystery watch is in fact a WAZ1116, which oddly I can only find on a Honk Kong website called 'DFS'... (thanks to Tom and Evan at TAG Heuer for clearing this up for me - I just have to know!).

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