The clocks have gone forward, marking the start of daylight saving time in the UK.
On Sunday 29 March the time jumped forward an hour when it hit 1am – and yes, it means you’ll have lost an extra hour of sleep.
But the gain of an hour of daylight will mean lighter evenings and darker mornings.
“Spring forward, fall back” has been part of our calendar for more than 100 years – but whether we should continue the practice is hotly debated.
But why are some people against the clocks changing – and why do we do it in the first place?
Here is what you need to know.
Why do we have daylight saving time?
The change from Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) to British Summer Time (BST) signifies the start of daylight saving time (DST) in the UK.
DST lasts from the last Sunday in March until the last Sunday in October, when the clocks go back an hour.
The day the clocks change always falls on a weekend to cause the least amount of disruption to schools and businesses.
It is a common belief that DST was introduced to help give farmers more daylight hours to work in the fields. But this is not exactly true.
George Hudson, a New Zealand entomologist – someone who studies insects – first campaigned for more evening sunlight back in the 1890s, so he could study his beloved bugs. It was the first time that changing the clocks around the seasons had been suggested seriously.
Jump to 1907 and British inventor William Willett – the man credited with bringing daylight saving to the UK – self-published a pamphlet called The Waste Of Daylight, in which he outlined his frustration with not getting the most out of summer days.
He initially proposed that clocks jump forward by 80 minutes in four incremental steps in April and reversed the same way in September – but he died before any law was implemented in the UK.
The first country to adopt…
