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The Watch Barn Discover our extensive collection of pre-owned watches from the world's leading brands.

This watch introduced a complication that had never been on a wristwatch before. The dynamographe you can see near twelv...
30/09/2026

This watch introduced a complication that had never been on a wristwatch before. The dynamographe you can see near twelve o’clock reads out, in real time, the actual torque coming off the mainspring as it unwinds - not just how much running time is left, but how hard the spring is currently pulling. Nobody had bothered to display that information before 2002, when Audemars Piguet built it into the Royal Oak Concept CW1 for the model’s 30th anniversary.

The case is just as unusual. It’s made from Alacrite 602, a cobalt, chromium and tungsten alloy developed for aerospace and medical use, hard enough to score 430 on the Vickers scale while staying light. No other watch, from AP or anyone else, has used it since. Inside, the caliber 2896 was built by Renaud & Papi with titanium bridges and a tourbillon cage fitted with shock absorbers rated to 50 Gs, while the crown’s three functions - winding, neutral, hand-setting - are spelled out on the dial in French initials, N, R and H, rather than hidden away. Only 150 were made, across three years of production

28/09/2026

No lever escapement here - Voutilainen’s calibre 28 runs on two escapement wheels instead, which is where the name comes from too (Vingt-8, French for twenty-eight). Kari Voutilainen designs and finishes it entirely in his own workshop in the Swiss Jura, and as of the end of 2025, he’s stopped taking new orders for it. Fifteen or so years in, this particular architecture has reached the end of its run. We don’t get many of these through the barn, so having this one on the bench for a few days was a genuine treat.

25/09/2026

A tourbillon exists to argue with gravity. Breguet patented the idea in 1801: mount the escapement and balance wheel in a rotating cage, spin it once a minute, and the errors of any one position average themselves out. His design needed a bridge above the cage as well as below it. It took until 1920, when a Glashütte watchmaker named Alfred Helwig worked out how to hold the cage from underneath alone, for that top bridge to disappear. What’s spinning at six o’clock here, once every sixty seconds on this RD5, is still doing exactly what Breguet asked of it a little over two centuries ago, just with nothing left in the way of the view.

24/09/2026

This watch started as a Facebook post. In 2012, Robert-Jan Broer captioned a photo of his Speedmaster “Speedy Tuesday”, just because it was one, and the phrase grew into a hashtag and a following. Omega marked its fifth anniversary in 2017 with this watch: a tribute to the 1978 Alaska Project III, with a reverse panda dial, radial subdial numerals, and a fully matte case. Limited to 2,012 pieces and sold only through Omega’s own website, it sold out in four and a half hours.

In the 1650s, Pope Alexander VII couldn’t sleep. He wanted a clock in his bedroom that told the time without ticking lou...
23/09/2026

In the 1650s, Pope Alexander VII couldn’t sleep. He wanted a clock in his bedroom that told the time without ticking loudly or striking the hour, and one he could read without lighting a candle. The solution built for him at the Vatican did away with hands altogether - a rotating disc carrying the hour numeral swept along an arc of minutes, lit from within by an oil lamp.

Audemars Piguet revived the idea in 1991, after one of its watchmakers came across a description of the mechanism in a Swiss watchmaking journal. It became the Star Wheel, the watch that brought wandering hours back into modern watchmaking. This 15212NB carries the complication into the Code 11.59 case, in black ceramic and white gold. Three discs turn beneath a curved sapphire crystal, each one taking its turn to point to the minute scale at twelve, over a dial of blue aventurine doing a fair impression of a night sky. Underneath sits the calibre 4310, AP’s automatic movement with the star wheel module built on top, running to 70 hours of reserve.

Six coats of lacquer, hand-riveted markers, and a colour Rolex kept out of the 41mm entirely. Candy Pink only comes in 3...
08/09/2026

Six coats of lacquer, hand-riveted markers, and a colour Rolex kept out of the 41mm entirely. Candy Pink only comes in 36mm and 31mm, a quieter revival of the lacquer dials the brand first used on 1970s Day-Dates.

Nobody asked for a green dial Submariner. Rolex made one anyway in 2010. The watch community called it the Hulk. Rolex s...
07/09/2026

Nobody asked for a green dial Submariner. Rolex made one anyway in 2010. The watch community called it the Hulk. Rolex said nothing. It ran for ten years before being discontinued. The new version is more refined. This one is more memorable.

The Datejust was first made in 1945 - the first self-winding waterproof watch to display the date in a window on the dia...
03/09/2026

The Datejust was first made in 1945 - the first self-winding waterproof watch to display the date in a window on the dial. Eighty years later it remains in continuous production, which makes it one of the longest-running watch designs in history. The 178240 is the 31mm version, a size Rolex positioned deliberately between the 28mm Lady-Datejust and the 36mm standard model. It is the most genuinely unisex Datejust ever made - not scaled down from the men’s, not scaled up from the ladies’, but designed to sit exactly in between. Black dial, smooth domed bezel, Oyster bracelet, Calibre 2235 inside. No fluted bezel, no gold, nothing to distract from the composition. On the right wrist with the right tattoos it looks like it has always been there.

Jiro Katayama taught himself watchmaking from YouTube in 2008. The No.6 dial is modelled on Japanese industrial power me...
02/09/2026

Jiro Katayama taught himself watchmaking from YouTube in 2008. The No.6 dial is modelled on Japanese industrial power meters. It sells in Japan by lottery only. Some of the most interesting things in horology are happening nowhere near Switzerland.

The 1300.2 winds in both directions. When Journe refined the calibre into the 1300.3, he switched to uni-directional win...
31/08/2026

The 1300.2 winds in both directions. When Journe refined the calibre into the 1300.3, he switched to uni-directional winding - a new ball-bearing system that increased efficiency by only engaging the mainspring on one arc of the rotor's movement. The 1300-2 predates that decision. It is the last version of the movement that winds the way Journe originally intended. A wrist shot does not show you that. But it is there.

Address

The Watch Barn By Chrono24, The Victorian Barn, Wickham Hall
Bishops Stortford
CM231JG

Opening Hours

Monday 9am - 5:30pm
Tuesday 9am - 5:30pm
Wednesday 9am - 5:30pm
Thursday 9am - 5:30pm
Friday 9am - 5:30pm
Saturday 9am - 4pm

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+441279704150

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