Time in the United Kingdom
the time zones used in the United Kingdom
The United Kingdom uses Greenwich Mean Time (GMT, UTC+00:00) (also known as Western European Time) between October and March, and British Summer Time (BST, UTC+01:00) (also known as Western European Summer Time) for the rest of the year.
BST applies from the last Sunday in March to the last Sunday in October. The time shift is intended to provide more sunlight in the evening.
History
Until the advent of the railways, the United Kingdom used local mean time. Greenwich Mean Time was adopted first by the Great Western Railway in 1840 and a few others followed suit in the following years. In 1847 it was adopted by the Railway Clearing House, and by almost all railway companies by the following year. It was from this initiative that the term "railway time" was derived.
It was gradually adopted for other purposes, but the legal case of Curtis v March in 1858 held "local mean time" to be the official time. On 14 May 1880, a letter signed by 'Clerk to Justices' appeared in The Times, stating that 'Greenwich time is now kept almost throughout England, but it appears that Greenwich time is not legal time. This was changed later in 1880, when Greenwich Mean Time was legally adopted throughout the island of Great Britain under the Statutes (Definition of Time) Act 1880 (43 & 44 Vict.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Time in the United Kingdom” is the time zones used in the United Kingdom. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Time, United and Kingdom, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4127125. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1840, 1847, 1858 and 1880.
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This entry incorporates text from “Time in the United Kingdom” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.