London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets Ahead.
Ok, sleeves rolled up, let’s get to work.
We were going to do Van Gogh today.
And not just Sunflowers. Arles. Ear.
But the whole business. Including the little-known chapter – Van Gogh in London.
Anyway, that was the plan.
But then – as Harold Macmillan famously put it – “Events, dear boy, events.”
Yesterday evening. Sunday evening. Seven o’clock.
And it’s still light.
And you find yourself thinking –hang on… wasn’t it dark at this hour on Saturday night?
Miraculous.
So Van Gogh is quietly shown the door,
and in comes something much closer to home.
Something that,
twice a year,
rearranges London without so much as asking by your leave.
The clocks. The wave of the magic wand that turned 1 am instantly into 2 am. Leap frogging the sixty minutes from 1 am to 2 am. That hour – between 1 am and 2 am – simply didn’t exist. In short, the move to British Summer Time.
Now here’s a question.
The first time that happened, well over a century ago now, what did London make of it?
The morning after the clocks went forward.
Did people cheer? Grumble? Miss trains? Turn up early? Turn up late?
And what did they even call it?
Because it wasn’t “British Summer Time” to begin with – not in the easy, familiar way we use it now.
The idea was known as daylight saving – sometimes “summer time” – and when it finally came in, in May 1916, it came not as a lifestyle upgrade…
…but as a wartime necessity.
Fuel. Efficiency. Production.
The light wasn’t being saved for evening strolls.
It was being saved for the war effort.
But the story – the proper London story – begins earlier.
Petts Wood.
Out on London’s south-eastern edge.
Summer morning.
Early. Very early.
And a man on a bicycle looking at a sleeping city.
Blinds down.
Curtains drawn.
Sunlight pouring in – and nobody making use of it.
His name: William Willett.
So here’s the takeaway, in a very real sense, we have London to thank for what we now call British Summer Time.
Now Willett is not some dreamy eccentric with a bright idea and too much time on his hands.
He’s a builder.
And not just any builder – one of the last of the great Victorian speculative builders.
He and his father built over a thousand houses in late Victorian London.
Hampstead.
South Hampstead.
Lyndhurst Gardens,
Eton Avenue, Elsworthy Road.
If you know those parts – up here on London Walks’ home patch, as it happens –
big, solid, quietly confident houses – you’re looking at Willett territory.
High standards.
Proper plumbing.
Proper wiring.
Good joinery.
Architects on staff.
Styles evolving –
from the tail end of Italianate swagger to Queen Anne flourish
to that quieter vernacular revival.
In short: these people knew how to build London.
Willett himself –
educated at Marylebone Grammar School,
in the family firm by about 1880 – had a hand in shaping all of that.
He marries.
Raises a family.
Makes money.
Diversifies.
Estate agency out of Sloane Square.
Brickworks.
A welding firm.
A lighting generator.
Even a speculative flutter on Spanish bauxite mining –
the sort of thing that sounds promising until it very much isn’t.
But what he’s remembered for – what puts him into your life,
twice a year – is that bicycle ride.
That irritation.
In 1907 he publishes a pamphlet: The Waste of Daylight.
And it’s exactly that.
A complaint – but also a proposal.
Move the clocks.
Let London live better with the light it’s given.
Now, being an Edwardian gentleman,
he doesn’t suggest a crude one-hour jump.
No, no.
Four adjustments of twenty minutes each in April.
And the same back again in September.
Ease into it.
Civilised.
Measured.
Thought through.
He campaigns.
Lobbies.
Buttonholes MPs.
In 1908,
a Daylight Saving Bill is introduced in Parliament.
And fails.
Reintroduced.
Debated.
Discussed.
And fails again.
Always just short of the necessary support.
And then –
as so often happens –
history intervenes.
War.
Suddenly this isn’t about pleasant evenings.
It’s about coal, output, survival.
In 1916,
Germany makes the move.
And Britain follows.
May 21st, 1916.
Under the Defence of the Realm Act,
the clocks go forward in the United Kingdom.
(beat)
Those long, delicious summer evenings?
We owe them, in no small part, to the Great War.
And London wakes up to a slightly altered day.
Same sun.
Different clock.
Breakfast comes earlier.
Work starts earlier.
Evening stretches out.
And yes – there is confusion.
Missed appointments.
Public clocks out of sync. Newspaper columns patiently explaining what exactly has happened to time.
You can imagine the letters pages.
But here’s the poignancy.
Willett doesn’t see it.
Early 1915.
Trouble in that Spanish mining venture –
the Matallana Company. Allegations of fraud.
He travels to Spain to sort it out.
On the journey home,
he catches a chill.
Influenza follows.
He’s brought back to his house –The Cedars, Camden Park, Chislehurst.
And there, on March 4th, 1915,
he dies.
Fifty-eight years old.
A fortune behind him.
His affairs – rather tangled.
His son Herbert taking over,
only to die two years later.
And the idea?
The idea outlives them all.
And here we are.
Yesterday evening.
Seven o’clock. Still light.
And in the background –
because we’re not living in 1916 but in our own unsettled moment – the news hums away.
Tensions. Uncertainty.
That faint sense that the world may be shifting again.
And London?
Carries on.
Holds the light a little longer.
Refuses, just for an hour or so,
to give in to the dark.
London sets the pace.
And sometimes –
just sometimes –
one man changes the timing.
We’ll be back here tomorrow with another London story.
Tomorrow we’re going to play a literary card. I’ve got a pair of literary aces. Dickens and Donne. Haven’t decided yet which one I’m going to play. The only thing for sure is they’re both winners.
Watch this space.
See you tomorrow.
Streets Ahead.