With the coming of trains and the complexity of making timetables something had to be done to standardise time so in 1847 the Railway Clearing House recommended that every rail company adopt Greenwich Mean Time as the standard ‘railway time’. When travelling across the country, stage coaches had to allow a generous leeway to accommodate different local mean times. On the day this post was published, solar noon in Norwich was at 12.03:34 Greenwich Mean Time while on the other side of the UK, in Aberystwyth, it was 12.25:05. The prime meridian of 0 degrees longitude is at Greenwich, UK (although the stainless steel strip marking 0° has been shown by GPS to be 102 metres east of this). As the Earth rotates relative to the sun, a town one degree longitude west of another will experience solar noon four minutes later. When time was estimated by sundial, different towns often kept different times, each based on local noon.
There are clock faces on all sides of the clock tower although the dials facing into the prison probably carry the extra layer of meaning of time as punishment: ‘serving time’ or ‘doing time’. It was built in 1886-7 the army moved out in 1959 to be replaced by prisoners in the 1970s. St Clement’s Church at the junction of Colegate and Fye Bridge StreetĪs a military building, Britannia Barracks on Mousehold Heath is unusual in that it was built in the Queen Anne Revival style of the Arts and Crafts Movement, or as Pevsner and Wilson have it, ‘the Norman Shaw style’. The heavy weight in such clocks could also drive accompanying automata of which Norwich had 59, “including a procession of choir monks and figures representing the days of the month, lunar and solar models, and an astronomical dial”. Once, Norwich Cathedral had an astronomical clock (1321-5), built by Roger de Stoke, that preceded Salisbury’s but was probably destroyed in the C16. The striking of a bell to mark the hours was therefore originally religious: either private (in churches and monasteries) or public (the call to worship). The world’s oldest working clock (1386) in Salisbury Cathedral has no face since it was designed solely for striking the hour, as once required for the monastic Liturgy of the Hours – the daily routine of communal prayer at seven set hours of the day.
The first mechanical clocks, driven by a weight whose fall was regulated by an escapement movement, appeared in the 1200s. St Andrews possesses a clock as well as a sundial. This large hall church, squeezed between two alleyways, is second only in size to St Peter Mancroft. St Andrew’s was re-built in Perpendicular style 1499-1518 on the site of a previous church, making it one of the last (late) medieval churches in Norwich.
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