Connect your Claude, Codex or OpenClaw for full transcripts on millions of podcasts. Two week free trial, cancel anytime.

KL Kristen Lippincott On In Our Time (BBC)

“In England, for example, in the 1840s, everyone kept local time. … But with travel, with commerce, you suddenly had people, if you like, being able to move faster than the sun. So if you left London and took a train to Bristol, you would arrive 20 minutes early by the Bristol time.”

In Our Time (BBC) · Ideas & Essays · October 2026

“In England, for example, in the 1840s, everyone kept local time. … But with travel, with commerce, you suddenly had people, if you like, being able to move faster than the sun. So if you left London and took a train to Bristol, you would arrive 20 minutes early by the Bristol time.” — Kristen Lippincott, In Our Time (BBC)

Historian Kristen Lippincott on why the railways forced Britain onto a single national time. She explains that this led to the 1847 railway time system based on Greenwich Mean Time. From an archive episode of the BBC's In Our Time.

In Our Time (BBC) · 2026-10-12 Listen to the episode → More from Kristen Lippincott → More Ideas & Essays quotes →

Transcript

In Our Time (BBC) Around 34:01 into the episode
Speaker 1

Friday and empire. Trade and empire.

Speaker 2

…from the sea to the land, the development of the railways, references being made several times in this program to different places. Bristol had a different time from London and so on. This didn't work, so they were looking for a national time and then a global time. Can you take us through that?

Kristen Lippincott

Yes, well, in England, for example, in the 1840s, everyone kept local time. So that's, as you were saying, Bristol might be, say, 20 minutes behind London, because that was the time that the sun passed the local meridian at noon. But with travel, with commerce, you suddenly had people, if you like, being able to move faster than the sun. So if you left London and took a train to Bristol, you would arrive 20 minutes early by the Bristol time. So it was really in the 1847 that there was an internet, our national railway time system that was based on Greenwich Mean Time.

Speaker 2

Was there much resistance to it?

Kristen Lippincott

There was a lot of resistance. We want

Speaker 2

our own time in Bristol.

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

More from In Our Time (BBC)

“He does… in the sort of definitive version that he produces in 1518, give us a bit of a clue, and that's a map of Utopia, which in fact does not resemble the crescent shape at all that's described… what it does resemble is a skull. And so it tells us that utopia is a memento mori… none of these things that we pride ourselves on in our society, 16th century or 21st, wealth and social standing and property, none of that matters in death.” — Joanne Paul, In Our Time (BBC) “You can't divide the functions of God off. Say God the Father's Creator and God the Son is the Redeemer and God the Spirit is love. All of the developed faith of the Christian church is that all God's actions in the world are the actions of the triune God. So it's not a job creation scheme for three different bits of God.” — Janet Soskice, In Our Time (BBC)