Londoners are about to gain a free hour in bed. At 2am on Sunday morning the clocks go back one hour to 1am, the clocks returning the UK to Greenwich Mean Time and bringing the summer’s long evenings to a definitive end.
It is the familiar twice-yearly ritual, but it is also one of the sharpest weekends of the year for anyone who notices the light. Sunset in London tonight lands at 5:48pm in British Summer Time; by tomorrow evening, with the clocks back to GMT, the sun sets at 4:46pm. On Monday morning the payoff arrives in reverse: sunrise moves from 7:39am back to 6:43am, so dawn breaks over an hour earlier in old money.
What actually happens at 2am
The mechanics are simple but catch people out every year. At 2am, the hour repeats — the clock jumps back to 1am and the night simply runs twice through the 1am–2am stretch. For anyone who works through the night, from NHS shifts to night-bus drivers and club staff, the “extra hour” is very real: it is an hour actually lived, and many workplaces pay it.
Most phones, laptops and internet-connected devices will handle the change themselves, switching overnight without being asked. Traditional clocks, watches, the oven, the car dashboard and the central-heating programmer generally will not. That is the bit people forget until Monday morning, when the kitchen clock says one thing and the train is not where they expected it.
Londoners’ Sunday: an extra hour of everything
The immediate gift is sleep. Anyone who keeps a regular bedtime wakes at the same clock time on Sunday morning having slept an hour longer — which, for a city that seems permanently short of rest, is no small thing.
The hour also lands in the middle of the weekend, so its effects spread across Sunday’s plans. Night-time venues get a bonus hour of dancing; anyone out in Soho or Shoreditch on Saturday night effectively gains an extra hour of the night, while pubs closing “at midnight” close an hour later in real terms. On the other side, Sunday evening roasts and pub quizzes feel suddenly darker — by 5pm tomorrow it will be night outside.
Transport passengers should double-check overnight journeys. Some operators publish their timetables around the repeated hour, with services shown departing at “1am (BST)” and “1am (GMT)” or adjusted times; it is worth confirming any journey that crosses 2am, particularly airport runs and Night Tube services.
Your practical checklist
Worth doing tonight or tomorrow morning:
- Put the oven, microwave, car clock and heating timer back an hour — the ones phones never fix.
- Check any medication reminders, alarms and CCTV or baby-monitor clocks that run on their own time.
- Shift your clocks before bed so Sunday morning starts honestly.
- Remember the return trip: clocks go forward again at 1am on the last Sunday in March 2027, when everyone loses an hour.
Darker evenings, lighter mornings
The trade-off is the light. From tomorrow, evenings slide towards the year’s shortest day in December, and London’s late-afternoon will feel suddenly nocturnal. The flip side is genuinely useful: mornings brighten by a full hour on the clock, which makes the school run and the commute feel lighter — at least until the days shorten further.
It is worth adjusting accordingly: check bike lights and car headlights now rather than on the first dark commute, and keep an eye out on the roads. With today’s rain giving way to a drier Sunday, plenty of Londoners will be out in parks chasing the peak of autumn colour before the evenings close in entirely.
A hundred years of tinkering
The UK has been doing this for over a century. British Summer Time was first introduced in 1916, during the First World War, as a way of making better use of daylight through the summer months. The system keeps the country an hour ahead of GMT through the warmer months and returns it to GMT for winter — a compromise that still provokes an argument in parliament every few years, but shows no sign of going anywhere.
For now, the instruction for tonight is simple: before you turn in, put the clocks back, enjoy the extra hour, and accept that tomorrow evening will feel like midnight by six.
