[GrantAmey]

There was a lecture about this in St Olave’s church during the 2025 Festival of Ideas, and you are correct.

Every town and city had its own astronomical time, although London and York were the first ones to be accurate due to having their own observatories, and Britain only gained a single time zone due to pressure from the railways wanting to have a single national timetable.

This required an act of Parliament, the Statutes (Definition of Time) Act 1880, to be passed so that the legal precedent of Curtis v March from 1858, which ruled that local time was official time, not GMT, could be set aside,

https://yorkfestivalofideas.com/2025/calendar/about-time-york-daytime/

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