Mayfair Clock Repair Shop Since 1995: Pendulum of Mayfair

Pendulum of Mayfair is the kind of clock shop that makes you lower your voice when you walk in. The showroom at King House, 51 Maddox Street, London W1S 2PH, is filled with Georgian longcase clocks, bracket clocks and French mantel clocks, and every one of them has been through the family's own workshop. The same team will take on your clock too: the firm offers a full antique clock repair and furniture restoration service, carried out by its own trained staff rather than sent out to subcontractors.

The company was incorporated in February 1995 and the London shop opened that November. At the opening, the head of Sotheby's clock department was quoted saying that no business restored its antiques as sympathetically, a remark he could back up because he was shown a clock he had sold unrestored at auction. The firm's Cheshire arm, Coppelia Antiques at Holford Lodge in Plumley, has been running for more than 50 years, and that is where the heavy restoration happens.

The business is run by the Clements family, and Daniel R. Clements signs the repair page. The firm says it does very little advertising because most work comes by word of mouth, and the testimonials page carries notes from Sir Cliff Richard, thanking the team for rebooting his clock, and from Jacob Rees-Mogg after a Bilbie clock was driven down to Somerset from Cheshire. It was also highly commended as Best Interiors Boutique at The Mayfair Award.

The repair page opens with a warning: be very careful whom you trust with an antique movement, because much of the workshop's time goes on undoing earlier bad repairs. Every movement is cleaned first, then pivots and bushes are reworked to close tolerances, using Swiss Bergeon bushes or bushes the workshop casts in brass to match the colour of the plates. Pallets are restored with high-grade material, and the final clean and polish is done wearing gloves.

Dials are coated with a colourless lacquer to keep them clean, and every finished movement is tested and regulated for 7 to 21 days before it leaves. The firm's claim is that a longcase movement it has serviced should not need work for wear for the next 40 years, needing only oiling every one to two years, which it describes as a five to ten minute job an owner can do with a fine brush and specialist clock oil.

A longcase clock is a piece of furniture as much as a machine, and the cabinet side is taken just as seriously. Apprentices are recruited through local schools and trained for five or six years. Repairs use wood of a similar age to the piece, so the workshop buys distressed antiques purely to saw up for veneers and has built up stocks of graded old timber over two decades. The aim is to keep original colour and patination rather than strip a case back to look new.

There are more than 200 unrestored longcase clocks in storage awaiting work, all kept in temperature and humidity controlled rooms. That matters for owners too: the shop recommends keeping antique clocks and furniture between 40 and 65 percent relative humidity, and blames central heating for more damage to antiques in recent decades than in the previous 300 years. If your longcase case has split near a radiator, that is the conversation to start with.

Prices are listed online in pounds. A Georgian longcase clock by John Crouch of Knightsbridge, around 1775, is £24,500, and one by Francis Perigal at the Royal Exchange, dated 1778, is £15,500. A fusee skeleton clock from around 1860 is £4,950, an Austrian Vienna wall clock of the same period is £2,850, and a French mantel clock from about 1890 is £425. The show-stopper is a Victorian French singing bird automaton table clock at £16,950.

Not everything is a five-figure heirloom. The shop says it supplies plenty of leaving presents for company directors as well as anniversary, birthday and Christmas gifts, with prices from a few hundred to a few thousand pounds. In that bracket, a 1970s Thwaites and Reed falling ball clock is £1,950, an Edwardian Big Ben picture clock is £1,250, and a German 400-day clock is £975. Those smaller pieces are the easiest way to own something the workshop has already set up.

Every mechanical antique clock sold comes with a written one-year guarantee, and the firm delivers in the UK and ships door to door abroad, with regular exports to the United States. Its installation guide is worth reading even if your clock came from elsewhere: never turn the hands backwards past a strike, wind eight-day clocks clockwise but month clocks usually anti-clockwise, and move a calendar between 3pm and 5pm to avoid catching it in mesh. One turn of the pendulum nut changes the rate by about a minute a day.

Oxford Circus, on the Central, Victoria and Bakerloo lines, is the nearest Tube station, a few minutes' walk south down Regent Street and into Maddox Street. The shop sits on the stretch between Regent Street and New Bond Street, so it is easy to fold into a Mayfair afternoon. St George's, Hanover Square, where Handel worshipped, is around the corner, and the auction houses and galleries of New Bond Street are close enough for comparison shopping. Ask Karpo in the Karpo APP for afternoon tea near Hanover Square if the visit runs long.

Pendulum of Mayfair, King House, 51 Maddox Street, London W1S 2PH. Email: sales@pendulumofmayfair.co.uk. Hours of business: Monday to Friday, 10am to 6pm. Weekend and out-of-hours visits are arranged by appointment over the phone. Services: movement repair and restoration for longcase, bracket and wall clocks, plus cabinet restoration. Sales stock carries a written one-year guarantee. Workshop: Coppelia Antiques, Holford Lodge, Plumley Moor Road, Plumley, Cheshire WA16 9RS.