British Summer Time Ends

British Summer Time officially comes to an end early tomorrow morning when clocks will be put back one hour at 1am. British Summer Time (BST) runs from the last Sunday in March when clocks are moved forward one hour from Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) to the last Sunday in October.

In practical terms this means that the sun, which has been rising around 7.40am this week and setting around 5.45pm, will now rise at 6.44am tomorrow and set at 4.43pm. Probably good news if you have to get up early but very noticeable if you get up later because suddenly you’re missing an hour of daylight.

Psychologically that can be the point where the onset of winter becomes very obvious. The daylight hours will steadily decrease to a low of just under eight hours in mid December then start to slowly increase again.

If you’re visiting London and want to know about time, how it came to be measured, GMT, astronomy and navigation, the place to go is the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, home of the Greenwich Meridian Line (0 degrees longitude) which you can step over and get your picture taken on in the courtyard, and also houses excellent exhibitions of clocks and timepieces through the centuries, telescopes, interactive exhibits on astronomy, navigational tools and how they developed, along with the stories of the people who pioneered these disciplines.