Most first-time diamond buyers arrive at a Hatton Garden workshop with a hierarchy of priorities in the wrong order. They have spent weeks reading about colour grades and clarity grades, they have memorised the difference between VS1 and VS2, and they believe they are ready to assess a stone on the 4Cs. Then the jeweller places two round brilliants side by si...

The first thing most people notice when they arrive in Hatton Garden is that it is considerably smaller than they imagined. For a street with this much commercial and historical weight behind it, EC1N is compact: a concentrated quarter of the City of London fringe where more than 300 jewellery businesses operate within a few minutes’ walk of each other. It is...

Most mechanical watches bought new at retail will trade below their purchase price within five years. This is not a pessimistic conclusion; it is the observable secondary market reality for the broad mass of production watches, including many made by brands whose marketing heavily implies otherwise. The question of which luxury watches hold their value in any...

There is a particular confidence in walking into a jeweller’s studio with nothing more than an idea. A colour that has stayed with you for years. A gemstone seen once in a magazine and never forgotten. The outline of a design sketched on a phone screen at midnight. Bespoke dress rings are where those private instincts become fine jewellery, built to specifica...