Land of Hope and Technology February 2016 | Page 5

ISSUE 1

The best located time
zone in the world
That the world sets it clocks by a standard
that uses a line of longitude that goes
through east London is not the point. GMT
just happens to be the best located time
zone in the world. This has nothing to do
with invention, and everything to do with
geography, the position if you like of tectonic
plates.
The sun rises in the east, and sets in the
west. Under the convention we use today,
the day begins in Japan, and works its way
west across Asia, Europe and then across
the Atlantic. When it is 5.30 pm in Japan
and the day is drawing to a close, it is just
beginning in the UK. The working days
overlap. As the sun moves west, the working
day draws to an end, first in East Asia,
then on to India, the Middle East, and then
Europe. By the time the day draws to an end
in the UK, the working day in California has
begun.

The UK can thank the Pacific for being so much
bigger than the Atlantic, for the stroke of luck that is
the peculiar advantage of the GMT time zone
The timing, is down to convention. But the
overlap in the day is to do with where the
sun sits in the sky at any one time. For as
long as the times in each of the world’s time
zones correspond to the position of the
sun, the UK’s day will always overlap with
the day in both Japan and California, and
moving westwards from Japan everywhere
between. By contrast, in every other time
zone in Europe and in Asia west of Japan,
when the day begins locally, it will be ending
somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, and will
not have reached the west coast of the US
This is one of the UK’s core strengths.
In a world that is becoming ever more
interconnected, this strength will if anything
become even more important. From the UKs’
point of view, this advantage is down to pure
luck. The UK can thank the Pacific for being
so much bigger than the Atlantic, for this
stroke of luck.