How did railways force Britain onto one national time, according to Kristen Lippincott?

Kristen Lippincott said that in the 1840s English towns kept local solar time, so Bristol ran about 20 minutes behind London. Trains let people travel faster than the sun, which made local time unworkable, and around 1847 a national railway time based on Greenwich Mean Time took hold. She listed four sources of resistance: civic pride, fear of 'railway aggression', religious objections that God set the sun, and astronomers who preferred local time.

• Lippincott compared fear of railway aggression to modern fears of global companies.
• She cited confusion over which time zone George Bush senior meant when he said 'we will strike at five' in the first Iraq war.

▸In their words

“So if you left London and took a train to Bristol, you would arrive 20 minutes early by the Bristol time.” Kristen Lippincott · at 42:50 — open in the transcript →

Source: our own transcription of the episode. The full conversation is on In Our Time (2026-10-12). Read the whole episode summary →

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