Greenwich puts the G in GMT
I have a soft spot for the so-called “GMT”, a complication on a wristwatch that enables you to track two different time zones at a glance, through the addition of a fourth hand tracking a 24-hour rotation marked on the bezel.
For some people the GMT feature is a gimmick. For me, travelling (semi) regularly and with most of my team on a different continent, it’s genuinely useful — for example, when you’re away on a business trip and need to know whether it’s a sociable hour to call home, you adjust the main hour hand when you land, and just check the GMT hand to see what time it is at home. It’s one of the reasons why I wear my much-abused Tudor Black Bay GMT so much.
Incidentally, it was the watch that accompanied me to Detroit last week, as it did to Amsterdam, Valencia and Copenhagen earlier in the year.
This pen, the Onoto Magna Greenwich, stayed home safe and sound — I was reluctant to take a loaner pen to a famously gritty city like Detroit — but I thought of it often as I juggled calendars and tried to find the right slot to say a quick goodnight to my kids.
Why? All will become clear in a moment.
Meet the Greenwich’s party trick
At first glance, the Greenwich is a Magna like any other: square-ended, sterling silver-trimmed, with black resin and Onoto’s iconic clip.
Look again and you’ll see 12 pinstripe lines along the barrel representing the 12 time zones, and a very fine silver-filled engraving around the cap illustrating the outline of a world map. And then you see the real party trick.
In lieu of a standard cap band, you find a rotating ring (which looks like titanium to me, but I didn’t check), engraved and black-filled with the 24 hours of the day; engraved into the cap itself is another set of 24 hour markers, which corresponds to the world map above it. By aligning the ring gauge against the cap gauge, you can calculate the offset between two time zones and easily convert from your local hour to another time zone.
This manual GMT mechanism takes a couple of minutes to get familiar with, but once you understand the logic it works very well indeed. As a tactile piece of engineering, it’s usable: getting a grip on the smooth, slim ring to move it requires a little knack, because if you grip it too tightly, or grip the cap too, it won’t turn. But it does rotate smoothly, and once in position, it won’t move on its own — this is no fidget spinner. You can glance at it throughout a trip and be confident that its conversion won’t have slipped.
Nor does the mechanism interfere at all with the pen. It feels just the same as any other Magna, the cap action is unchanged, there is no hindrance to using the iconic clip.
A subtle celebration
This is the joy of Onoto limited editions (and the Greenwich is limited to 200).
There’s no liquid-filled compass on the finial. There’s no spinning propeller blade. The world map isn’t hand-painted in full colour. It’s subtle, almost invisible. And it’s very well done. The engraving, done in-house on brand new machines, is superb, with lines and numerals crisp and even.
As a pen, well, I’ve reviewed enough Magnas that you’ll know my opinion by now. I have a Magna in my top tray of ‘personal pens’ along with heavy-hitters like the Montegrappa Extra, Otto Hutt designC and Montblanc 149. I wouldn’t be without a Magna: it’s every bit the equal.
The base-model Magna sits beautifully in the hand and no steel nib has any right to be this brilliant.
Onoto has also gradually reduced the number of turns needed to remove the cap, and it’s now a tolerable 2.5 turns. There’s very little here I could possibly complain about.
Priced for first-class tastes
I have one big problem, though. At £599, the Greenwich is expensive, especially for a steel nib C/C filler made of plain black plastic. You can get a gold-nib, piston-filler Montblanc 146 or Scribo Feel for that, or a lava Visconti Homo Sapiens with a vac filler and in-house 18k nib.
Previous engraved Magna editions like the elegant Keats and delightful Pi are around the £450 mark with steel nibs and C/C. This is still Pelikan M800 territory, but a much more reasonable hit to the wallet.
Upgrade the Greenwich to the lovely Onoto plunger filler and #8 gold nib (my preferred Onoto configuration) and it’s suddenly £1,200 — nearly twice the price of a Santini Giant or a Leonardo piston filler with a #8 nib. I understand that precise engraving is painfully time-consuming, that Onoto uses sterling silver for its trim, and that running costs for a UK-based business are growing all the time. But I fear that £1,200 is pushing affordability for many in the community at the moment.
So: a great pen, with a unique party trick that’s both useful and unobtrusive until called upon. The Greenwich would make a special gift for the travelling businessperson (or anyone with itchy feet), and it is such a superlative writer that it’ll make short work of conference notes or holiday journals alike.
But I can’t wave away the high price. If the GMT functionality isn’t a must-have for you, there are equally lovely pens in the Onoto range for £200 less, and you can certainly get better specs for the price from other brands. So when you’re buying: take your time.
The Onoto Magna Greenwich is available soon starting at £599 from onoto.com. I was loaned this pen to review and it’ll be winging its way back to Norwich shortly.
That would be a really lovely gift to oneself. I doubt I would ever spend such a sum on one pen.
Very nice looking pen with an interesting feature, but as you say, very expensive for what it is. For the same money one could get a very attractive Leonardo and a Casio G-Shock (not so attractive to some) that would cover the writing and world-time/GMT functions extremely well.