Hello BST: Clocks Go Forward Tonight – 24 March 2012

Clocks go forward one hour ‘tonight’.

CHANGING TIMES: The clocks go forward one hour tonight, as we welcome back BST. (IMG_9194)

At 1:00am GMT tomorrow morning (‘tonight’), clocks across Europe move forward one hour for Daylight Saving, to become 2:00am BST. It marks the annual start of British Summertime (BST), seeing us through until 28 October. It effectively means that there will be no 1:30am tomorrow – at 1:00am, we jump to 2:00am.

But why bother?

The excellent website of Woodlands Junior School in Kent explains:

We’ve been changing our clocks forwards and backwards in the UK since 1916. It’s all to do with saving the hours of daylight, and was started by a man called William Willett, a London builder, who lived in Petts Wood in Kent (near our school).

William Willett first proposed the idea of British Summer Time in 1907 in a pamphlet entitled ‘The Waste of Daylight’. Willett had noticed that the summer mornings’ light was wasted while people slept, and that the time would be better utilised in the afternoon by putting the clocks forward. After campaigning for years the British Government finally adopted the system a year after Willett’s death.


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Andrew Burdett

Andrew Burdett is a twenty-something from Maidenhead in Berkshire, working for ITV News.