It's that time of year again when nights start getting darker and the clocks go back later this month.

 

After a glorious summer winter will soon be upon us as we look forward to the build-up to Christmas.

And with the number of daylight hours getting shorter it's not long before the clocks change from British Summer Time to Greenwich Mean Time.

 

This change happens in the last weekend of October every year in the UK and in 2018 will be in the early hours of Sunday, October 28.

The clocks will go BACK one hour at 2am. We move from BST to GMT, meaning we will be an hour behind. So, we get an hour extra in bed on the Sunday, but lose an extra hour of sunlight in the evening for the next five months.

 

If you’re still unsure as to which way the clocks go, the easiest way to remember it is probably ‘spring forward, fall back’, although we obviously call it autumn in the UK, not fall.

Why do the clocks go back?

Benjamin Franklin first had the idea to chance the clocks while he was in Paris in 1784. He suggested that if people got out of bed an hour earlier they'd get extra daylight.

However it wasn't something that was properly introduced in the UK until 1916. It had been discussed a number of years before by the government but many people opposed it the first time around.

 

Clocks go back in...

 

A man called William Willett wrote a whole pamphlet about it in 1907 called 'The Waste of Daylight' about how people wasted valuable hours of light during the summer.

He was also a keen golfer and would become rather annoyed when it got too dark for him to continue playing in the evening.

Sadly he died in 1915, a year before it was introduced in the UK.

Will my phone update automatically?

As for technology, as long as your phones are connected to the internet via 4G or WiFi then the time will change on them automatically. They should change at 2am on Sunday, October 28, by going back one hour.

 

When do the clocks go forward again?

The clocks will not change again until March 31 2019, then the clocks move forward again for British Summer Time.

By March the nights will have drawn out a fair bit already but during December the UK gets as little as seven hours and 40 minutes of sunlight each day.