OK students of English in London! I hope you weren't late for English school last Monday morning. On Sunday morning at 1am the clocks “went forward” one hour and Greenwich Mean Time [GMT] becomes British Summer Time [BST] so you will all lose one hours sleep. It was in 1884 that everyone agreed to adopt GMT and so the whole world had regulated and predictable time. Britain adopted GMT eight years earlier. The next English school trip you do in London, go to the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. At the top of the hill in Greenwich Park you can stand astride the GMT line with one foot in East and one in the West.
Interestingly, when you travel around Britain you may note that most churches in towns and villages have a clock, which before 1880, gave people the local time that could vary greatly in different towns and cities. It was the railways in the 1850s which found the different local times chaotic for their timetables. The time between cities in the North and the South could vary as between 30 and 40 minutes.The chaos was solved by a new law in 1880 adopting a “national clock” with the same time throughout Britain.
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