About time: Pete Dexter on maintaining the Emett Clock before it returns to its former location

You’ve worked on the Emett Clock since 2011. Could you tell us about what led to your relationship with it? 
The backstory starts with my granddaughter – she’s seventeen now but at the time she was two. I was on grandad duties – I was in town, thought I’d park myself in front of the Emett Clock and sit down for ten minutes: to my disappointment it was looking very drab, so I found the name of someone to email, and say I’m an engineer, can I help? They were welcoming and said sure you can have a look. 

I did quite a bit of work to make it safe. I got involved again in 2014 when the centre wanted to do refurbishment. So I’ve had piecemeal involvement – and they contacted me in December last year and asked if I wanted to get involved again. 

So with your background, it wasn’t too difficult to get to grips with the clock at the start? 
Yes, it’s unique, but from an engineering point of view it’s nuts and bolts and wires, and when you’ve learned about those sorts of things you can adapt. So although it was different from what I’ve worked on before it was familiar in the types of materials and construction used. It is old, so things like nuts and bolts were imperial sizes that I had to revert, and the electrical wiring was built to a 1970s standard and I had to build it to a 2020s standard. 

Over a decade working on, in and out, it is quite a long time… 
It’s been a focused piece of work each time. And each time there’s been a different challenge. The first time around was making it safe, the second time was making it look more like it was originally. This time around, there’s still missing parts we’ve fabricated to make it look more like the original. 

When I look at the butterflies and what colours the glass jewels are in the wings – I’ve looked at old YouTube videos from decades ago, and I’ve freeze framed it to see what colours they are. There are six what I call players: three squirrels, three birds, each playing an instrument, and they’re the orchestra and they rotate every fifteen minutes and I’ve studied videos so they’re put back together in the right order.

Could you go into more detail on what you’ve had to do during this recent stretch of work?
Over the years there’s wear and tear, some metal bits need replacing, bits need oiling and degreasing – a lot of the work is cleaning. Because we’re moving it from upstairs to downstairs there’s a whole new pond, and a whole new plumbing system which I'm designing – so some new design work; a wide variety of tasks. 

In your time working on the clock have you discovered anything unexpected about it, which people might not know? 
I have discovered parts that would normally be found on a bicycle, and I’ve thought – ‘why would you have this?’ And I think it’s because – the way that Emett used to work, he’d often make things out of household objects. You see some of his other pieces of work involving a bedside table or gramophone player. And in the clock I’ve found pedals attached to a bicycle and a freewheel device – other people wouldn’t know that’s in there.

How has your understanding of it changed? Do you think you’d ever be able to build something like it?
It’s crossed my mind – the more I’ve worked on the clock, how big a job it would be. It’s taken a lot of time to just refurbish it, so imagine the amount of hours and effort that went into the original conception and design… what we see now can’t have been the original version of it, he must have tried different ways of getting things to work together, and look correct. And after Emett had done this clock he had about a ten year gap before he did anything else major, so maybe it wore him out. The next one he did was in Basildon and if you look at that it’s not as ornate as the one in Nottingham, so he probably scaled back a bit.

In your opinion what’s most interesting about the work of Roland Emett? 
The word whimsical is often used with him – he was a cartoonist as well so there’s a lot of imaginative flowing design. But from an engineering perspective things have to work, and have to move. For instance we’ve got a big wheel on the front that has nineteen butterflies, and it has to be balanced so the wheel will turn so from the engineering point of view it has to be correct as well as looking nice. So I think he was able to combine those two approaches: the artistry and the engineering to end up with a functioning object that looks the part.

The story of you working on the clock started when you visited with your granddaughter, but it also has lots of meaning to lots of different people in Nottingham… 
Yes, we talk about meeting places… the number one meeting place in Nottingham would have probably been the left lion, the number two place would probably have been the Emett Clock. I think when it was moved upstairs the public reaction wasn’t great, but now it’s coming home and it can become a focal, meeting place for people again.

Any news on when people can expect the clock back in its original place at Victoria Centre? 
Winter, we’ve said. The difficulty being that I don’t want to be in a position where we say, ‘we’ve run out of time, let’s unveil it when it’s half built’. It’s got to last a few more decades yet so this is an opportunity to get it right.