When do the clocks go back and why?

With autumn very much under way, it will soon by time to turn back the clocks one hour.

The switch – which happens on Sunday, October 26 – marks the end of British Summer Time (BST) and the beginning of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).

For early starters, the morning will appear lighter but the evenings will be noticeable darker, which can take a little time to adjust to.

But, of course, there is one obvious silver lining, on Sunday we all get that extra hour in bed.

When do the clocks go back?

The clocks will go back by an hour at 2am on Sunday, October 26.

Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) always starts at 2am on the last Sunday in October.

Most electronic devices like smartphones will automatically roll back an hour, but some, like ovens, may not and you may have to manually change them.

Obviously, you are not a space-time-bending marvel who has travelled back in time, instead sunrise and sunset each appear an hour earlier during GMT.

One way to remember which way the clocks change is to say the phrase ‘spring forward, fall back’ to yourself, with fall in this case also meaning autumn.

GMT will last until March 29 – the last Sunday that month – when the clocks go forward by one hour and we lose an 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 changing the clocks 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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