When do the clocks change this weekend and why?
When does spring begin? For some, it’s when the first dandelions poke up through the grass. For others, it’s the first time you head out without a coat.
But most people see it as when we turn our clocks forward by an hour as British Summer Time (BST) kicks off.
We ‘Spring Forward’ in the spring to welcome those longer days and we ‘Fall Back’ to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) every autumn.
But what time is the shift this weekend?
When do the clocks go forward?
The clocks will go forward by an hour at 1am on Sunday (March 30).
British Summer Time (BST), also called daylight savings time, always starts at 1am on the last Sunday in March.
Your electronic devices like smartphones will automatically roll forward an hour.
This means, we are sorry to report, you’ll lose an hour in bed.
Obviously, you are not a space-time-bending marvel who has travelled forward in time.
As Royal Museums Greenwich puts it: ‘Although this change has no effect on the length of each day, sunrise and sunset each appear an hour later in the summer’.
BST will last until October 26 – the last Sunday that month – when the clocks go back by one hour and we get a bonus hour in bed.
Why do we change the clocks?
The man behind daylight savings is widely credited as Benjamin Franklin, convinced he was wasting his time in bed while living in Paris in the 18th century.
The idea of losing and gaining an hour each year took a while to catch on across the pond.
In the 1700s, Brits set their clocks according to the sun, creating dozens of conflicting local times depending on where in the country you were.
So for a time (no pun intended) places in the far west of England were about 20 minutes ‘behind’ London.
You’d board a train heading north and basically have to reset your watch every 10 miles as you travelled across these different ‘time zones’.
It was only in the 1840s that we in the UK first adopted standard times after the Great Western Railway introduced ‘railway time’ – a consistent time dictated by the Royal Observatory at Greenwich.
British builder William Willett, Coldplay singer Chris Martin’s great-great-grandfather, angry at the ‘waste of daylight’ during summer mornings, put the idea forward in 1907.
It was adopted in 1916 during the First World War.
Is British Summer Time a good thing?
It depends a lot on who you ask. You may have heard it’s because farmers are keen to get an extra hour in the sun to work, but some farmers actually hated the idea when it was first proposed.
Another popular myth is it was an effort to reduce energy consumption during the Second World War – though some researchers say it doesn’t lower our energy bills.
Extra daylight also means extra time to spend money, so some see it as good for the economy… except some alternatives to BST are way more profitable.
So is changing the clocks a good thing? It is for reasons beyond that extra hour in bed in the Autumn.
For one, more time in the sun helps boost our mood and encourages us to exercise more. Traffic-related accidents go down slightly because of daylight savings, studies suggest, and crime overall goes down slightly.
If you feel a bit jet-lagged and struggle to sleep after the clocks change, check out these helpful tips.
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