By the end of the eighteenth century some seven thousand artisans-almost half the parish-were dependent upon watch-making. Clerkenwell itself produced some 120,000 watches each year. In almost every street there were private houses which had as door-plates the sign of escapement-maker, engine-turner, springer, finisher, and so on. These were modest but solid properties, with the workshop generally constructed at the back. But not all the tradesmen were so fortunately placed, and a nineteenth-century essay upon clocks in Charles Knight’s Cyclopaedia of London remarks that “if we wish to be introduced to the workman who has had the greatest share in the construction of our best clocks, we must often submit to be conducted up some narrow passage of our metropolis, and to mount into some dirty attic where we find illiterate ingenuity closely employed in earning a mere pittance.” The passages, closets and attics may be compared with the wheels and dials of the clocks themselves, so that Clerkenwell itself becomes a vast mechanism emblematic of time and the divisions of time. The census of 1861 listed 877 manufacturers of clocks and watches in this small parish. But why here? The historians of horology have pondered the question and arrived at no satisfactory conclusion; “the commencement of that remarkable localisation” is not certain, according to one authority cited by Charles Knight, except that “it appears to have made a noiseless progress.” Another remarks: “nor have we heard any plausible reason assigned by those who, residing on the spot, and carrying on these branches of manufacture, might be supposed to be best informed on the matter.” So, we may say, it just happened. It is one of those indecipherable and unknowable aspects of London existence. A certain trade emerges in a certain area. And that is all.
But in Clerkenwell we have learned, perhaps, to find larger patterns of activity. Did the presence of skilled artisans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries actively promote the cause of radicalism? By 1701 the manufacture of the watch was being used as the best example of the division of labour, so that one might say that the creation of time-pieces formed the paradigm of industrial capitalism. “Here every alley is thronged with small industries,” George Gissing wrote of Clerkenwell in The Nether World (1889), “here you may see how men have multiplied toil for toil’s sake … have worn their lives away imagining new forms of weariness.” Lenin and Eleanor Marx had found fertile ground. Or was it that the creation of the division and subdivision of time was an obvious neighbourhood idol, to be smashed by those patriotic radicals who wished to return to an earlier polity and a more innocent state of society? Nevertheless the clock-and watch-makers are there still. The mystery of the place remains.
The Marx Memorial Library is still to be found on Clerkenwell Green, within which is preserved the small office where Lenin once edited Iskra. Beside it are a snack bar and a restaurant, which have been owned by the same Italian family for many years. Until recent days Clerkenwell Green and its vicinity retained that dusty, faded look which was a direct inheritance of its past. It was secluded, out of the way of the busy areas to the south and west, something of a backwater which few Londoners visited except those whose business it was to be there. The green harboured printers, and jewellers, and precision-instrument makers, as it had done for many generations. St. John’s Street was dark and cavernous, lined with empty or dilapidated warehouses.
