The Guildhall Clock Is Always Getting Ahead of Itself

Published on: 1 Sep, 2017
Updated on: 3 Sep, 2017

Today (September 1, 2017) at 1.45pm the Guildhall clock was spot on, but by tomorrow…?

For hundreds of years people needing to know the time in Guildford High Street have been able to simply glance up at the iconic town clock projecting from the Guildhall. But here’s a secret, it always runs a little fast! So if you have been relying on the Guildhall clock and arriving ahead of time here’s why…

The gravity driven mechanism, housed not in the clock but in the roof space, dates back to perhaps the 1500s. Until the introduction of of an automated system in 2012 the weights were wound up by hand.

Now an electric motor does that job but, as there is no space for an additional regulator, it has proved impossible to remove manual intervention completely.

Much time was spent on fine tuning when the new system was installed but it proved impossible to set the clock to keep completely accurate time.

So the decision was taken to set it to run a little fast and regularly correct it, manually, to ensure that the error was never more than a few minutes.

By setting it to run fast, rather than slow, it takes only one man to stop the clock, wait for Greenwich Mean Time to catch up, and re-synchronise it. If it was set to run slow, and had to to be brought forward, it would take two men.

In any case, most of us, probably, would rather we are a couple of minutes ahead of time than behind. So you can carry on using the old clock and never be late!

The clock mechanism inside the roof space of the Guildhall. Don’t take the date of 1683 on the outside clock case as the age of the clock. These cogs and pieces of movement may be 100 years older!

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