Like most industries, the web design industry is affected by fashions and trends. As soon as one website tries something and coincidentally happens to be successful, people instantly presume the design was the key factor and update their websites accordingly.

Google introduced the minimalist website at a time when most websites were cluttered and suddenly everyone wanted to pull in the Digital Feng Shui experts and de-clutter their websites.

Blogs looked like the future once, and big corporate websites not only needed blogs written in a casual way by the Managing Director Press Office, but this expanded to making the whole website look like a blog, and in some cases putting out key financial information in in blog postings rather than in the investors or financial news section.

Now there is a new trend – the analogue clock.

I am not sure where it started, but the first version of it I saw was on the relaunched UK Parliament website, which apart from being full of bugs had suddenly acquired an animated clock at the top of the page. Despite being fairly universally disliked in the comments section, the website designer was adamant that it would remain.

Recently,  the BBC website received one of its periodic evolutions and gained a clock at the top of the page. Semi-tolerable in that it is in the style of the BBC clock from about two-decades ago, so old people will like it, but I still wonder what functionality it adds to the website.

Recently I noted that the Chinese website, Xinhua had gained a clock – although it looks suspiciously like the BBC clock and even had the same animated seconds hand. The file name is different though, so they have at least tried to cover their tracks if plagiarism has occurred.

This morning, my attention was drawn to a website promoting a course about tea tasting (nice idea, ouch price tag) and it has a clock on the top of the website. Are people timing their tea making process by website clocks I wondered?

These are just the websites I could recall this morning – I’ve seen clocks sprouting up all over the place over the past couple of months.

The clocks are taking over!

As quite a fan of both the art and the science of Horology, and at one time had about a dozen different clocks in my living room, I love clocks – but not on websites.

If I want to see clocks, I’ll go here. I don’t need to be reminded of the time every time I visit a website though.

Please, let the fashion for putting analogue clocks on the tops of websites be a short-lived one.

Update:

It’s been drawn to my attention that the beta version of the new BBC website has dropped the clock. It seems the era of website clocks may indeed be a short-lived one. Hurruh!

A somewhat speeded up video of the climb up the Clock Tower to stand next to Big Ben when it bongs the hours. I suspect the sound of feet on the steps is not real.

The video was mentioned by the Parliament Twitter manager.

The video goes a bit further than the public tours, as it goes above the bells to the lantern on the top of the Tower. Incidentally, this is lit whenever the House of Commons is sitting, so you can look up and always know if the MPs are nattering at that very moment in the Commons.

For details of how to climb the Clock Tower yourself – click here.

In the early part of the 20th century, domestic clocks were still not hugely reliable and regular resetting was generally needed. People who owned a telegraph line or one of the modern radio could listen for the time pips, but there was one other way of getting your clocks reset correctly – that was a visit from the traveling time lady.

Ruth Belville spent some 40 years setting an old watch to the exact time each Monday morning at the Greenwich Royal Observatory – and then she would travel around London carrying that precious watch and would visit clients to correct their clocks. She carried on doing this right up to 1939, and when she retired she still have 50 customers. She died four years later, just as domestic radios were finally becoming popular enough to have probably put her out of business anyway.

The service was actually started by Ruth’s father, John Belville, an Assistant at the Observatory in 1836 as part of the government service to deliver Time to offices around London – until his death in 1856. His widow, Maria Belville, then offered to continue the service as a private venture – a proposal which was accepted by the subscribers and Observatory management. Maria retired in 1892, handing over control of the business to their daughter, Ruth, who carried the same pocket chronometer round London each week until she retired.

The service could have collapsed at one point as Ruth’s service competed with the telegraph company which sold time signals to its subscribers. In one notorious episode, the Chairman of the Standard Time Company, St John Wynne gave a lecture which was picked up by the newspapers where he accused her service of being quaint, and as she was female could lure the male workers at the Observatory to carnal wickedness.

Naturally, the papers leapt on this story – which far from harming her service – the publicity actually did a lot of harm to the telegraph company as it was found to be less reliable than a little lady traveling around town with a pocket watch on her person.

Why am I writing about this? Well, I got an RSS feed alert of a lecture occurring in the Royal Society on 2nd May which will be given by David Rooney, Curator of Timekeeping at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich – who is writing a book on the subject.

The Royal Society Events Page

As an aside, before the advent of the railways in the UK, time was calculated locally and varied throughout the country. This however made calculating railway timetables almost impossible and hence the country slowly adopted a single time zone for the whole nation.

I was once told that the famous clock at Christ Church College in Oxford still strikes 9pm but at 9:05pm, which was the original Oxford Time.

You may also be interested in my visit to the World’s Oldest Clock Museum in the City of London a few months back.

I spent a rather pleasant 45 minutes at a small museum in the City of London devoted to the history of clock (and watch) making in London. The collection was begun in 1814 by the Clockmakers guild and is said to be the oldest collection specifically of watches and clocks in the world.

It is not that well known as a museum it seems, and was fairly quiet when I was there, with just a few other people wandering around – which makes it easier to see the exhibits, but is a bit of a shame as it is a really well laid out collection and there is a lot to see there – much of it very very rare indeed.

As you go into the museum, there are large explanation panels which go round the room in order (almost) and explain the history of clocks and clock making in London from about the 1600′s until the current day.

I was interested to learn that while today we consider Switzerland to be the height of watch making, in fact London has been historically the center for quality clocks, and Switzerland only gained prominence through “low quality” mass production in the 19th century.

The exhibition is a mixture of the mechanics of clock making – and the jewelry that is so often associated with the cases used to carry pocket watches.

The information boards are a good mix, being quite informative without either being too technical to understand or dumbed down to appeal to 10 year old kids. They also put each part of the history of clock making into context with the history of London so you can understand how great events such as the Great Fire of London or the Civil War affected clock making in the country.

Harrison and Longitude

I was also surprised to see that the museum houses the Harrison’s Chronometer H5 – which was the famous “watch” which solved the problem of measuring Longitude. Having been to the Greenwich Royal Observatory where the other Harrison clocks are displayed, I guess I had presumed that the actually winning clock was there as well. While the earlier clocks are visually vastly more interesting to look at – it is still quite something to see the original winning watch itself on display at this museum.

The story of Harrison and Longitude was dramatised in a very good 3 hour long docu-drama in 2000 staring Jeremy Irons.

Visiting

If you have a spare hour one day and are in the area of the Guildhall, I would recommend this little gem of a museum for a visit. I would say that a visit would last anything from 30 minutes to an hour depending on how engrossed you get in the exhibits.

To find the museum – presuming that you approach the Guildhall from the front main entrance – when you get into the courtyard, turn left and head towards the library. The museum is inside the building on the ground floor. There is an x-ray machine for bags – no photography is permitted alas.

The museum is open Mon-Sat 9:30am-4:45pm. Entry is free.

On the web

City of London webpage about the museum

The Worshipful Company of Clockmakers