There are five collections – all named after planes – and they have everything you’d want from this style of timepiece. There’s the tachymeter scales and sub dials in the Hawker Hurricane; the rugged and durable nature of the superior construction; and the wonderfully vintage-looking straps across all the ranges.

Stylistically AVI-8 doesn’t put a foot wrong and gets a proper British salute for making a democratic pilot’s watch.

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4. Casio

You may know Casio for its gold-plated digital bracelet watch that, for a period in the noughties, was the ironic wrist adornment of every fixie-bike riding, flat-white drinking Hackney dweller worth their E9 credentials. But to reduce it to that one signature is to seriously underestimate what this affordable watch brand has to offer.

The retro nostalgia is still there – in its aptly named Retro collection – but you can also get your hands on world timers, Bluetooth hybrids and styles suitable for scuba diving. Think of the brand as a one-stop-shop for all your watch needs, from digital to dress.

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5. G-Shock

Casio’s muscular cousin is over 30 years old but its charm certainly hasn’t diminished. When it was first created by Casio engineer Kikuo Ibe, its selling point was that it had a 10-year battery life, was water resistant to 10 bar (100m) and would survive a 10m fall onto a hard surface (Ibe tested this by dropping 200 prototypes from third-story windows and rooftops).

Three decades later, this is still a design that takes some beating when it comes to durability. But now it comes with a range of added extras, from the useful – world time, automatic calendar and alarms – to the more specialist, such as moon data displays and yacht timers.

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6. Timex

Timex is considered the Everyman of the watch world. Historically it became renowned for a particular kind of all-American dependability – George Bush Jr wore one, presumably to distract US voters from his upper-class background – but recently it has acquired a certain retro cool.