Welcome to Greenwich2000, the website where we talk about Time.

As the earth turns towards the southern summer and the northern winter we prepare to move our clocks forward or back. Don't forget to check here to catch up with all zone time settings.

Why are we as a species so determined to record time accurately?

Archaeology indicates that humans have used their knowledge of the heavens to measure time for thousands of years. The Sun's annual solstices and equinoxes gave reliable points for mapping the year and the constellations provided useful markers.

Different societies had their own reasons for dividing the day into hours, and the 24 hour day was used in Europe in the Classical period. Perhaps an important influence on marking the European day was the 6th Century Rule of St Benedict used in Christian monasteries. Monks gathered for prayer at set times each day.

For 1300 years people used local time so that, wherever you were,the sun was due east at 6 am, due south at noon and due west at 6pm. Greenwich Observatory initiated standard time when the line of zero longitude was set there. However, it took the need for accurate railway timetables to persuade the rest of the country to adopt Greenwich Mean Time. And it was only in 1884 that a treaty gave international agreement to using GMT as a standard.

These days we have an internationally agreed measure for time, the Universal Time Clock which is fine-tuned by scientific precision. But here in the UK we still use the old names and, as the autumn leaves are falling we leave British Summer Time behind and return to GMT on 26th October.

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